Student Creativity, Social Emotional Characteristics, and Well-being: An international comparison of PISA 2022

Scholarship is in the initial stages of understanding the scope of the impact of the pandemic on students’ wellbeing. There is significant decline in academic performance associated with pandemic related learning loss and an increase in behavioral problems, anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, isolation, and lethargy (Jones, Mallon, & Schnitzler, 2023). Nations across the world are grappling with appropriate interventions to deal with the social emotional wellbeing of children and adolescents (Gurr, 2020). Wellbeing is a multifaceted outcome which includes aspects of both mental and physical health (Paim, 1995). Wellbeing as a concept has been studied using a range of theories to help operationalize health (Bautista et al., 2023). More related to mental health, social emotional characteristics represent skills connected to positive emotions and to support pro-social behavior. Across an international context, different cultures and national education policies have placed varying importance on the value of student wellbeing in schools and support of social emotional characteristics. One of the ways in which schools can promote social emotional characteristics to increase student wellbeing is through the support of creativity (Acar et al., 2021). Creativity, both an academic and non-academic skill, bridges critical thinking skills with personal expression to enhance problem solving abilities. Creativity has been directly connected to wellbeing and identified as a mechanism for social emotional skills (Tan et al., 2021). However, the study of these three concepts is still developing and findings stretch across many different country contexts. The purpose of this study is to explore how creativity, social emotional skills and wellbeing are related and to compare practices across countries. This study employs subsamples from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment of 15-year-old students’ skills and knowledge in mathematics, reading, and science with a major focus on mathematics. PISA 2022 introduced creative thinking as an assessment domain for the first time and student questionnaires were administered with optional items related to student social emotional characteristics and creative thinking, as well as an optional questionnaire on student wellbeing (OECD, 2024a). Of the total 81 participating countries and economies, this study’s focus includes several subsamples that participated in the creative thinking questionnaire and assessment (N = 64), as well as those that also participated in student questionnaire items related to general social emotional characteristics (N = 41) and wellbeing (N = 9) (OECD 2024c). Each of these countries has a minimum sample of n=150 schools as a technical standard for completion of survey administration (OECD, 2024a). This study employs descriptive and comparative analyses utilizing student-level creative thinking, social emotional, and wellbeing measures as a preliminary step to better understand the relationships between these constructs within and across countries. Creative thinking measures include student perceptions of creative thinking in their personal and school environments, as well as self-efficacy and openness, and applications of creative thinking measured through the assessment (OECD, 2024b; OECD, 2024d). General social emotional measures include scales such as student curiosity, empathy, perseverance, and stress resistance (OECD, 2024b). Student wellbeing measures include scales such as life satisfaction, psychosomatic symptoms, and social connections (OECD, 2024b). Taken together, these measures assess student progress towards wellbeing with social emotional skills, and applications of creativity. This study seeks to uncover how different country contexts have supported student well-being in schools after a worldwide pandemic. The findings of this study will extend the literature in three important ways. First, preliminary results identify which of these areas and which measures most help to delineate the differences in how schools across various national contexts approached support of students post-COVID. Second, the international sample shows possible variations in how these concepts are related and contribute to outcomes associated with mental and physical well-being. Finally, based on these comparisons and relationships, we connect to national contexts and policies to provide an orientation as to priorities and approaches implemented since the pandemic. While student well-being is a prominent area of inquiry since COVID, PISA 2022 provides a unique opportunity to understand differences across an international dataset. Further, this study extends the literature since it includes creativity as a connection between traditional academic achievement and emerging well-being outcomes. Creativity has been shown to promote critical thinking skills with problem solving while serving as an outlet for resilience related to well-being. The research rigor of this study is found in the ability to present a cross-national comparison with multiple levels of data while offering practice interpretations based on overarching cultures and education systems. References Acar, S., Tadik, H., Myers, D., Van der Sman, C., & Uysal, R. (2021). Creativity and well-being: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 55(3), 738-751. 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