PISA 2022 Creative Thinking: What It Is, What It Is Not, and What Next?

ABSTRACT The 2022 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) included an assessment of creative thinking, representing the most comprehensive international large‐scale assessment of creative thinking to date. In this paper, we briefly present the objectives of PISA and how these goals have shaped its overall design and implementation, with important methodological, analytical, and interpretive implications for researchers. We then provide an overview of the conceptual and methodological foundations of the PISA creative thinking assessment and discuss how these were shaped within the broader context and constraints of PISA, particularly the feasibility of implementing scoring methods for open constructed responses at scale and maximizing cross‐cultural comparability of the results. We present in detail our approach to scoring the creative thinking tasks in PISA given these complex trade‐offs and discuss the implications of this approach for interpreting the PISA creative thinking results and conducting further analyses of the data. We also provide some reflections on future work for the OECD and beyond for assessing creative thinking at scale.