WA’s 15-year-olds are among the world’s best when it comes to creative thinking.
A new report from the Australian Council for Educational Research has revealed that Australian students were the second-highest achieving creative thinkers in an assessment of 64 countries.
Students from WA were among the highest achievers in Australia, second only to those in the ACT.
The creative thinking assessment measured students’ abilities to generate original and diverse ideas, evaluate, and improve ideas.
It was implemented for the first time in the latest round of tests for the Program for International Student Assessment.
The PISA results, released in December, showed that Australian teenagers’ skills in maths, science, and reading were below those achieved by teens 20 years ago, though the nation’s relative position improved in world standings.
However, ACER’s analysis found that Australia’s proportion of high performers in creative thinking was significantly higher than the OECD average of 27 per cent across every State and territory — ranging from 34 to 49 per cent.
Australia’s performance in creative thinking was similar to that of Canada and Korea, with only Singapore achieving a higher national average.
“Our findings provide insight into how imaginative, adventurous, confident and capable Australia’s 15-year-olds are in their creative thinking and how it is being fostered in classrooms across the country,” lead author Lisa De Bortoli said.
“This is critical information because creative thinking skills are fundamental to helping people develop innovative and effective responses to issues and problems — in their personal and professional lives, within communities, and as global citizens.”
The assessment tested teens on their written and visual expression and on their social and scientific problem-solving.
Question samples show that they included writing comic strip dialogue to accompany pictures, drawing a poster about space, or composing an original title to accompany an illustration of the Earth imposed on a light globe.
Students were also asked to devise creative solutions to encourage carpooling or hypothesize about why fewer frogs were collected from a river flowing out of a city.
Another question asked students to develop different film story ideas about a human named Leo interacting with an intelligent robot named Rob, devoting no more than eight sentences to each idea.
Australian girls did better than boys on creative thinking, though the gender difference was narrower for WA.
Students in independent schools performed better than students in Catholic and public schools.
https://thewest.com.au/news/education/australian-council-for-educational-research-report-reveals-wa-teens-among-worlds-best-for-creative-thinking-c-16549985