Profiles or Continua? Reproducible but Redundant Creativity-Resource Configurations in PISA 2022

Assessed creative thinking is a cognitive individual-difference construct—related to, but not equivalent to, conventional intelligence—that PISA 2022 measured directly at scale. We asked how its associated resources are structured, and whether discrete student “types” or continuous dimensions better predict creative-thinking performance. Using 44 education systems (306,704 students; complete-indicator sample 235,240), we estimated senate-weighted Gaussian mixtures of nine within-system standardized creativity indicators and related them to performance (10 plausible values; Fay balanced repeated replication). A six-profile solution was reproducible given adequate optimization (mean adjusted Rand index 0.95 across 12 subsamples), yet no class count was selected—information criteria improved monotonically from 2 to 12 classes—and the profiles were predictively redundant: in leakage-safe cross-validation they explained less variance (R2 = 0.028) than the nine continuous indicators (0.044) or a flexible continuous model (0.068) across K = 2–12 and under hard or soft classification. After a validated classification-error correction, performance-proximal dispositions and curiosity, more than relational perceptions, predicted creative-thinking performance. For measuring and modeling creative ability, continuous resource dimensions were more informative than discrete types, which amounted to an enumeratively underdetermined, predictively redundant re-description of continuous variation.