Revisiting educational assumptions: The surprising negative link between creative extracurricular activities and creative thinking in PISA 2022

BACKGROUND: While skill development is generally linked to relevant practice, the 2022 PISA creative thinking report revealed a negative association between students' creative thinking performance and their engagement in creative activities. AIMS: This study explored whether this negative association was linear, persisted across countries and remained after accounting for psychological and contextual moderators. SAMPLE: We used PISA 2022 creative thinking assessment data. The final analytical sample included 372,193 students across 49 countries. METHODS: We conducted correlation analysis and multiple regression with creative thinking as the outcome and creative activities as well as other contextual and psychosocial factors and their two-way interactions with creative activities as predictors. RESULTS: Creative thinking was negatively correlated with both in-school (r = -.25) and out-of-school (r = -.32) activities, a pattern observed in 47 of 49 countries. After controlling for other predictors, both types of activities remained negative predictors of creative performance (β = -.06 and β = -.27, respectively). However, the interactions revealed that openness to intellect and creative self-efficacy moderated the relation between out-of-school activities and creative thinking, showing small but significant positive associations, reversing the negative prediction. Additionally, feeling safe at school appeared to weakly but significantly moderate in-school activities. It should be noted that the effect sizes were relatively small and accounted for a limited amount of variance. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that creative activities may need restructuring to better support all students, and creativity measures likely need to continue to be refined.