Profiles or Continua? Reproducible but Redundant Creativity-Resource Configurations in PISA 2022

Assessed creative thinking is a cognitive individual-difference construct-related to, but not equivalent to, conventional intelligence-that PISA 2022 measured directly at scale. We asked how its associated resources are structured, and whether discrete student "types" or continuous dimensions better predict creative-thinking performance. Using 44 education systems (306,704 students; complete-indicator sample 235,240), we estimated senate-weighted Gaussian mixtures of nine within-system standardized creativity indicators and related them to performance (10 plausible values; Fay balanced repeated replication). A six-profile solution was reproducible given adequate optimization (mean adjusted Rand index 0.95 across 12 subsamples), yet no class count was selected-information criteria improved monotonically from 2 to 12 classes-and the profiles were predictively redundant: in leakage-safe cross-validation they explained less variance (R² = 0.028) than the nine continuous indicators (0.044) or a flexible continuous model (0.068) across K = 2-12 and under hard or soft classification. After a validated classification-error correction, performance-proximal dispositions and curiosity, more than relational perceptions, predicted creative-thinking performance. For measuring and modeling creative ability, continuous resource dimensions were more informative than discrete types, which amounted to an enumeratively underdetermined, predictively redundant re-description of continuous variation.