Canberra is silent as Australia climbs into the top 5
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 129 No 6, 23 August 2024, page 15.
The 2019 Mparntwe (Alice Springs) Education Declaration sets out two education goals for young Australians: (1) the Australian education system promotes excellence and equity, and (2) all young Australians become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members
of the community.
Topping global rankings is not an education goal for young Australians. But creativity is.
Creative Minds, Creative Schools, which reports on the results of the 2022 creative thinking assessment, was released by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on 18 June. The 2022 creative thinking assessment examines students’ capacity to generate diverse and original ideas, as well as evaluate and improve ideas across a range of contexts through open-ended communication and problem-solving tasks.
In the 2022 creative thinking assessment, Australia ranks fourth out of a total of 81 participating countries. Singapore came first in creative thinking, and literacy and numeracy.
Given the noise that often emanates from international comparisons of PISA’s reading, maths and science results, the silence from Canberra on the creative thinking result is disheartening. In the month after PISA’s release, Federal Education Minister Jason Clare issued ten media releases, dealing with matters like ending political interference in the Australian Research Council (26 June), appointment of Stephen Gniel as ACARA CEO (3 July) and support for First Nations students (11 July). All important matters, but there is nothing from the Minister on Australia’s top five placing in creative thinking.
Creativity and equity
The 2022 creative thinking report supports understandings of the correlation between creative thinking and socio-economic status. This is a powerful rationale for the federal government to ensure all schools receive 100 per cent of the schooling resource standard (SRS).
The report states: “Students with higher socio-economic status performed better in creative thinking, with advantaged students scoring around 9.5 points higher than their disadvantaged peers on average across the OECD.”
The report also states: “The strength of the association between socio-economic status and performance is weaker in creative thinking than it is for mathematics, reading and science.”
Data like this demands a response from the Federal Minister, in light of Australia’s first education goal and its focus on excellence and equity.
Making the most of creativity
While the rankings show which countries scored highly overall, the test also highlighted variations in types or applications of creativity. These results show what Australian students do well in our unique creative contexts and cultural orientations. The results also provide an opportunity for us to understand how we can make the most of them.
Such results offer an exciting opportunity to shift educational narratives away from simply “beating” other countries in overall results, and to reflect on how we might aspire to raise aptitude in multiple tasks. The risk, of course, is that such data merely reinforces simplistic international comparisons that drive “moral panic” responses and short-term stop-gap solutions.
For example, in Australia and just five other countries, “more than 88 per cent of students demonstrated a baseline level of creative thinking proficiency (Level 3), meaning they can think of appropriate ideas for a range of tasks and begin to suggest original ideas for familiar problems (OECD average 78 per cent)”.
That is a result Australia should be proud of and keen to build upon, in both social equity respects as well as the increasingly outmoded ATAR obsession.
Daniel X. Harris is a research professor in the School of Education, RMIT University, and Director of Creative Agency research lab (www.creativeresearchhub.com)
Read the report here: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-2022-results-volume-iii_765ee8c2-en