Cultural divergences in student creative thinking development: An exploratory analysis of PISA 2022 data

Creative thinking is widely recognized as a higher-order cognitive competence, yet evidence linking environmental contexts to creative performance across cultures remains scarce. Guided by Social Cognitive Theory and utilizing the PISA 2022 database, this study compares Eastern systems comprising Hong Kong, Macao, Chinese Taipei, and Singapore with Western systems represented by Australia and Canada. Mediation analysis and quantile regression were employed to examine how openness to intellect, creative self-efficacy, and participation in school and extracurricular activities channel the associations between creative environments and creative thinking scores. Results indicated that environmental contexts alone showed limited alignment with outcomes. Instead, specific mediators played critical roles. Universally, openness to intellect functioned as a positive mediator, whereas frequent extracurricular participation showed a consistent negative association. However, cultural pathways diverged significantly. In Eastern systems, creative self-efficacy and participation in school creative activities functioned as positive mediators across the entire score distribution. Conversely, in Western systems, these same factors exhibited negative mediating associations. Furthermore, distinct distributional patterns emerged in the West where a social creative environment aligned positively exclusively with lower-achieving students. These findings indicate that identical resources relate to creative thinking in divergent ways depending on cultural setting and achievement level. This study contributes to the cross-cultural literature by providing evidence-based implications for culturally sensitive instruction and underscoring the necessity of better calibrating creativity-related measures.