Fostering Creativity Through Education: Lessons From the PISA 2022 Survey

ABSTRACT For the first time, the Programme on International Student Assessment (PISA) has evaluated the creative thinking skills of over 140,000 15‐year‐old students in more than 60 countries, assessing their ability to engage productively in generating, evaluating, and improving ideas. This commentary positions the recent PISA 2022 international survey results in a larger perspective of fostering creativity through education. Specifically, this commentary explores (1) which creative abilities were assessed by the PISA survey. With a clearer understanding of what was assessed, we discuss (2) the main limitation of the PISA global creative thinking score, which is to obscure the profile of strengths and weaknesses of individuals, potentially leading to inaccurate conclusions about individuals' overall abilities. Lastly, (3) we discuss the potential impact of the PISA survey and highlight aspects of creativity, such as the pursuit of personally meaningful goals and self‐expression, that may be more difficult to capture in PISA‐type measurements but that may be fundamental for the cultivation of creativity in school.