Finland ranked among the top five OECD countries in creative thinking skills among young people, according to the Program for International Student Assessment’s (PISA) 2022 findings published on Tuesday.
This is the first time the PISA study has assessed young people’s creative thinking skills. It examined students’ capacities to generate diverse and original ideas, and to evaluate and improve ideas, across a range of contexts or ‘domains’.
The study found that Finland’s results are clearly above the OECD average, with only four countries performed better — Singapore, Korea, Canada and Australia.
Young people in New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark and Latvia were found be on par with Finnish students.
Among 15-year-olds in Finland, 39 percent achieved proficiency levels five or six, which are the top-performing levels in PISA, compared with the OECD average of 27 percent.
The OECD, or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries.
Finnish girls outperform boys
The gender gap in Finland was found to be the largest among the countries in the PISA study.
Nearly half of Finnish girls were top performers in creative thinking, while boys’ results were much closer to the OECD average.
The report noted that boys’ weaker results negatively impacted Finland’s overall score. Despite this, there were still many boys who reached the top performing level.
Tommi Karjalainen, Senior Ministerial Adviser at the Ministry of Education and Culture and Finland’s representative on the PISA board, told the STT news agency that the disparity between girls and boys has been observed in previous studies.
He said this is partly explained by boys’ weaker reading skills.
Background disparities
The study also highlighted significant differences between immigrants and the native population, with immigrant background youth in Finland showing notably poorer academic outcomes.
According to Karjalainen, the lack of reading skills is also an issue among immigrant-background youth.
The generally weaker socioeconomic status of young people with an immigrant background is also one reason, he added, and there are also other factors at play, but it has been difficult to verify them in studies.
The first results of PISA 2022 were reported for mathematical, reading and scientific literacy in December 2023. It showed that while the performance of Finnish young people has deteriorated, it remained above the OECD average.
