Philippines ranks at the bottom of new PISA test on creative thinking

MANILA, Philippines — Filipino students have one of the weakest creative thinking skills in the world, based on a newly launched global benchmarking test.

Fifteen-year-old students in the Philippines scored 14 points on average in the newly introduced creative thinking assessment of the 2022 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), placing the Philippines in the bottom four among 64 countries. 

This marks the first time that the PISA tested students on how well they can use their imagination and creativity to generate and improve upon ideas.

Filipino students' performance placed the Philippines in the same score range as three other countries on the bottom (or countries whose scores are not statistically different from the Philippines): Albania, Uzbekistan and Morocco.

The Philippines' mean score of 14 is also well below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 33, according to the PISA results on creative thinking published late Tuesday.

Countries that landed in the top five are Singapore (with students' average score being 41), Korea (38), Canada (38), Australia (37) and New Zealand (36).

Differences in the student performance of the highest- and lowest-performing countries are stark. 

For instance, only around 3% of Filipino students can match the creative thinking abilities of the average student in Singapore, based on Philstar.com's analysis of the publicly available PISA scores.

This is evidenced by the data that shows just 3.4% of Filipino students reached Level 5 proficiency in the test, while 30% of students in Singapore achieved this, the highest of any proficiency level in the developed nation. Level 5 is the second highest proficiency with scores of 41 to 48.

Similarly, no single Singaporean student who took the test scored at the lowest proficiency (Level 1, at less than six score points), whereas a third of all students in the Philippines scored at this level.

Besides Singapore, all other Southeast Asian countries who joined the creative thinking test, such as Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia and Thailand, scored below the OECD average but above the Philippines. 

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