Latent profiles of creative readiness and their associations with creative thinking and academic achievement

Although creativity is now widely treated as a core educational competency, comparatively little is known about how students' creativity-related self-beliefs, their dispositions, their behavioral engagement, and the supports around them cluster within individuals, or about how such clusters relate to directly assessed creative thinking. Drawing on the Saudi Arabian PISA 2022 sample (N = 6749), the present study applied latent profile analysis to characterize the co-occurrence of nine separate yet conceptually connected indicators. Creative readiness serves here as an author-supplied label for these cross-sectional configurations; it is neither an official PISA scale, nor a validated unitary latent trait, nor a developmental construct. Kept on the OECD-standardized metric in which they are released, the indicators covered creative self-efficacy; openness; imagination; curiosity; parents' reported view of their child's orientation toward creativity; creative activity inside and outside school; and perceived support from family/peers and from school. A five-profile solution was favored for its parsimony, its profile sizes, its classification quality, and its interpretability: Moderate-Emerging Creative Engagement (43.8%), Globally Disengaged/Low Creative Readiness (3.3%), Average-Balanced Creative Readiness (30.7%), High Creative Expression-Applied/Performative (3.9%), and High Creative Dispositions-Intrinsic (18.3%). Creative-thinking performance peaked in the Average-Balanced and High Creative Expression profiles (Ms = 27.40 and 27.60) and was weakest in the Moderate-Emerging profile (M = 16.55), with significant standardized pairwise contrasts falling between |d| = 0.26 and 1.11. The same ordering appeared for BCH-adjusted achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, where those two profiles again led and the Moderate-Emerging profile again trailed; variation in socioeconomic status across modal profile assignments, by contrast, was minimal (eta-squared = 0.010). These results document associations between configurations and observed outcomes; they do not demonstrate causal effects or developmental pathways.