In the third in our series of think pieces to unpick the policy conflation of the arts and creativity, we hear have an international perspective from Jane Polley, now Curriculum Specialist, The Arts, at ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority), after a career spanning acting, teaching, choreographing, and directing. Her PhD research is a critical discourse analysis of the Australian politico-media response to the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking results. She argues that the Arts can help us to understand and assess creativity/ies.
When PISA1 assessed the creative thinking of 15-years-olds in 64 countries in the 2022 assessment, they used an education psychology/cognitive science-based definition of creative thinking. Their definition “… the competence to engage in the generation, evaluation and improvement of original and diverse ideas” (OECD, 2024)2 was based on the ‘Four-C model’3 and the ‘little-c’ version of creativity. PISA explained that ‘little-c’ creativity is an everyday creativity that humans show when they might solve a scheduling problem, arrange some photos in an interesting way, or combine leftovers in a meal. For this researcher, PISA’s use of ‘little-c’ creativity exposed a definitional gap. There is an opportunity to define creativity based on an arts education paradigm in future creativity assessments.
Creativity definitions often refer to creativity as being able to produce something that is both novel and useful but that is only part of the story. Creativity and creative thinking are related polysemic concepts and they are still emerging and contested constructs in different theoretical spaces: that is, both concepts contain multiple and interpretable meanings, they can be hard to contain within definitional boundaries and are seen differently by diverse people in varied contexts. Several models have been created to try to encapsulate creativity. There is the Wallas’ stages model (Information, Incubation, Illumination, Verification); Rhodes’ factors model (Person, Process, Press, Product); and Glǎveaunu’s framework (Actor, Action, Artifact, Audience, Affordances). The Four-C model, referenced by PISA, identifies different levels or types of creativity.
- Big-c: Genius level creativity that changes and progresses cultures
- Pro-c: Expert or professional level creativity honed through extensive practise
- Little-c: Smaller, novel changes in everyday contexts
- Mini-c: Creative changes or outcomes for an individual
PISA used this model to underpin their assessment design, but future assessments might benefit from another type of creativity. Called ‘middle-c’ creativity (intentionally named to link with the arts), it is the competence to use an interplay of cognitive and embodied processes to spark imaginative thought and aesthetic practices that result in processes, products or performances that impact, affect or empower audiences or society.
The arts can teach us a lot about learning to be creative because creativity is most surfaced in arts education, most intrinsic to arts education pedagogies and practices, and most explicit in arts education processes, products, and assessments. A connection to arts education is made throughout the messaging of the PISA results. For example, in the Australian fact sheet4, if students aspired to a career in the creative and cultural sectors, they scored significantly higher than their peers, Australian students showed a higher proficiency in tasks that involved visual expression, and students had high access and participation rates in art and drama. PISA research also showed that the highest percentages of references to creativity in curricular or school subjects were in Visual Arts and Performance Arts.5
‘Middle-c’ creativity integrates a cognitive view of creativity with the sensorial and instinctual, where students move into knowingly crafting artistic elements or concepts through the sparking or igniting of insight and imagination6. Creativity has energy, it moves, transforms, and galvanises. Like all matter we are imagination made material and there is materiality to imagining7. When young people can artistically express themselves in environments that are relational, collaborative, skilful, and open, and are given time to refine and reflect then a multidimensional creativity might be more readily produced and assessed.
If you would like to see a webinar on Jane’s research called PISA: Politics and Artistry in Education please use this link.
- Programme for International Student Assessment. Since 2000 PISA has measured 15-year-old students’ abilities to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. In 2012 PISA also included an Innovative Domain and in 2022 for the first time assessed creative thinking. https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa.html Retrieved November 2, 2025 ↩︎
- OECD (2024), PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/765ee8c2-en. Retrieved July 25, 2025 ↩︎
- Kaufman, J. C. and Beghetto R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13 (1), 1–12. ↩︎
- PISA Results 2022 (Volume III)- Factsheets: Australia https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-results-2022-volume-iii-factsheets_041a90f1-en/australia_167b4caf-en.html Retrieved 25 June 2024 ↩︎
- Cignetti, M. and M. Fuster Rabella (2023), “How are education systems integrating creative thinking in schools?”, PISA in Focus, No. 122, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/f01158fb-en. ↩︎
- Greene, M. (1995). Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility. The Phi Delta Kappan. Vol.76, No.5 pp378-382 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20405345 ↩︎
- Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. ↩︎
