Factors Predicting Creative Problem-Solving Competence in PISA 2012: Evidence from Six Countries

Abstract

PISA measures the readiness level of 15-year-old students for the challenges they may encounter in their future lives, and evaluates their ability to reflect and to apply their knowledge to daily-life problems. PISA not only measures specific content domains such as mathematics, but also measures more general domains as creative problem-solving. Creative problem-solving is a new concept in PISA 2012, and identifying predictors of problem-solving for high, medium, and low achieving countries would be a novel and important topic. This study mainly investigated student and school characteristics that were effective in predicting problem-solving skills. Additionally, what would be the problem-solving performance difference among those countries if they had similar mathematics performance was identified. This study included students from Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Serbia and Turkey who had participated in PISA 2012. These six countries were considered to represent a fair spectrum for the participating countries in terms of creative problem-solving and mathematics performance. Multilevel regression analysis results showed that among student-level variables, openness for problem-solving, and experience with pure mathematics tasks predicted problem-solving performance positively in all countries. Socio-economic status predicted problem-solving performance positively in medium and low achieving countries. Surprisingly, experience with applied mathematics tasks predicted problem-solving performance negatively in all countries except Korea. School-level variables did not show a systematic pattern in predicting problem-solving performance. Among school-level variables, mathematics extracurricular activities, proportion of teachers with ISCED 5A, proportion of certified teachers and class size predicted problem-solving performance positively in some countries. ANCOVA results showed that the problem-solving difference among countries decreased when mathematics performance was controlled.