Revisiting educational assumptions: The surprising negative link between creative extracurricular activities and...

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.

This study explored whether this negative association was linear, persisted across countries and remained after accounting for psychological and contextual moderators.

We used PISA 2022 creative thinking assessment data. The final analytical sample included 372,193 students across 49 countries.

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.

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.

These findings suggest that creative activities may need restructuring to better support all students, and creativity measures likely need to continue to be refined.