Are Ukrainian 15-year-olds creative? Results of the national study PISA-2022 – News

59% of Ukrainian pupils achieve at least the basic – third – level of creative thinking in the 6-level PISA scale.

Photo: HayDmitriy/Depositphotos

The Ukrainian Center for Evaluation of the Quality of Education presented National report PISA-2022 regarding the success of Ukrainian apprenticeships in the field of creative thinking.

Its results show that 59% of 15-year-old Ukrainians demonstrated basic and higher levels of creative thinking, informs Ministry of Education and Science.

The department emphasizes that the results of Ukraine in the PISA-2022 study on creative thinking (27 points on a scale from 0 to 60) do not significantly differ from the results of some countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The result of Ukraine is 6 points lower than the average indicator of OECD countries.

What are the results of the PISA-2022 study on creative thinking among Ukrainian teenagers?

According to the MES, 59% of Ukrainian students achieve at least the basic – third – level of creative thinking in the 6-level PISA scale.

At the same time, every fourth 15-year-old teenager shows success on level 3. At this level, students demonstrate the ability to generate ideas for simple to moderately complex tasks for creative written or visual expression of ideas and creative solving of social and scientific problems. And they also begin to demonstrate the ability to generate original ideas or solutions in familiar contexts.

13% of schoolchildren in Ukraine achieve the highest levels – 5th or 6th. At these levels, teenagers able to generate creative ideas, evaluate and improve their own ideas or ideas of others in various and complex tasks. In particular, we are talking about tasks related to the creation of an abstract design or those related to unfamiliar scenarios for solving scientific and social problems.

The lowest score in creative thinking, at level 1 or lower, 18% of Ukrainian 15-year-olds have. This means that they can create very simple visual designs, rely on template (typical, obvious, unoriginal) ideas as a basis for your answer.

How did the students’ academic performance affect the results?

The Ministry of Education and Culture says that the results of students in the evaluation of creative thinking are directly related to academic success: the better results teenagers have in mathematics, reading and natural sciences, the better their creative thinking is.

“In Ukraine, success in creative thinking and academic success complement each other to a certain extent, but academic success is not a prerequisite for success in creative thinking.

In other words, both academically successful adolescents and adolescents with learning difficulties can be creative.” – the ministry notes.

The influence of differences between students on results

Students of colleges, technical schools, vocational and technical educational institutions for 5 points lag behind from teenagers who are getting an education in secondary schools, educational complexes. They are slightly less, but significantly, lagging behind students of lyceums, gymnasiums and specialized schools – by almost 2 points, the MES claims.

In addition, Ukrainian girls show better results in creative thinking than boys – they scored an average of 2 points more. Interestingly, in no country/economy do boys outperform girls in creative thinking.

In Ukraine, more girls have reached level 3 and higher (65% of girls and 56% of boys), while more boys are at level 1 and below (14% of girls and almost 22% of boys).

In creative thinking students from rural areas are 6 points behind their peers from cities with a population of over 100,000. Less than half of students from villages have reached the basic level (3 or higher), while in big cities such students reach almost 80%.

The number of 15-year-olds who have reached level 5 or 6 increases according to the size of the settlement – from 8% in villages to 30% in large cities.

How to develop creativity in students?

The analysis of successful education systems shows that for this it is important to:

• introducing creativity and/or creative thinking into all educational programs;
• support of educators in recognition, development and evaluation of creative thinking by determining the stages of formation of creativity skills;
• creation in the educational process of opportunities for students to engage in creative / creative activities, in particular in the interdisciplinary field;
• monitoring and evaluating the results of apprenticeships in creative thinking.

We will remind, the assessment of creative thinking of 15-year-old Ukrainian teenagers conducted during the international educational study PISA-2022, which analyzed the level of knowledge of schoolchildren.