International Student Comparison: Pisa Evaluation: German Students Averagely Creative

According to a study, the best young creative minds are in Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – German teenagers perform rather averagely when it comes to creative thinking. This was the result of a special analysis of the most recent PISA study, which was published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is responsible for PISA.

According to the study, young people in Germany can think creatively just as well as the average of their peers in OECD countries, putting them on a par with their peers in Spain, France, the Netherlands or Israel.

Comic dialogue and bee awareness

PISA tests 15- to 16-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science every three years. The results of the most recent study were presented in December. The tests – including this one – were already carried out in 2022. German students achieved the weakest performance values ​​ever measured for Germany in PISA. In addition to the standard test, this time it was also assessed how creatively students of this age can think.

For example, participants were asked to write down three different ideas within five minutes that could raise awareness of the importance of bees. In other tasks, they were asked to fill in speech bubbles in a given comic as creatively as possible or to change a poster with a view of space so that it fits the topic of “life in space.” According to the information, around 5,900 schoolchildren in Germany completed this creativity test.

Creative thinking is related to math, reading and science

The question was whether the young people could come up with an original idea, develop other people’s ideas further and come up with several ideas on the same question, explained educational researcher and head of the German part of the PISA study, Doris Lewalter from the Technical University of Munich.

“It’s about solving social and scientific problems and expressing yourself in writing and visually.” The evaluation shows that the ability to think creatively is closely linked to core competencies in mathematics, reading and science, the university said in a statement.

Girls everywhere more creative than boys

The study concludes that a similar pattern can be seen in creative thinking as in the general PISA test: East Asian countries are at the top and Latin American countries are at the bottom. What is striking at second glance, however, is the high level of creative achievement among young people from Australia and New Zealand, who did not end up in the top half of OECD countries in the math tests. In all OECD countries, the study confirms that girls have higher skills in creative thinking than boys. In Germany, this effect is more pronounced than the average in other OECD countries.

And in this study on creative thinking, as with the PISA results on math, reading and science, there are again clear differences “to the detriment of socially disadvantaged pupils and pupils with an immigrant background”, as the Federal Ministry of Education and the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany put it in a statement.