FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD students in the Philippines are among the worst in creative thinking, according to the latest study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The Philippines ranked 63rd out of 64 countries in a 2022 global assessment by the OECD that ranked 15-year-old students worldwide in producing and evaluating original ideas that would translate into effective solutions.
In the 2022 Programme on International Student Assessment (PISA) Volume III published late on Tuesday, the Philippines’ mean score in creative thinking score stood at 16, which was way below the global average of 33.
The Philippines’ score was only better than Albania which had a score of 13.
Singapore topped the list with a score of 41, followed by South Korea and Canada which both scored 38.
The rest of the top 10 included Australia (37), New Zealand (36), Estonia (36), Finland (36), Denmark (35), Latvia (35) and Belgium (35).
The OECD study was conducted in 2022 with about 690,000 15-year-old students from 66 countries.
“Many countries and economies score at similar levels in creative thinking. Small differences that are not statistically significant or practically meaningful should not be considered,” the OECD said in the assessment.
The OECD said one in four students in the Philippines, Morocco and Saudi Arabia said they found learning new things boring.
Students from the Philippines also did not provide a response for over a fifth of all items in written problem-solving tasks in the assessment.
OECD said that less than three for every 100 students in the top five performing countries of Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand performed around or below the average of the weakest performing countries or the Dominican Republic, Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Albania.
In PISA’s 2022 assessment for student performance in mathematics, reading and science, Filipino students were among the world’s weakest in those subjects, ranking 77th out of 81 countries and performing worse than the global average in all categories.
“Beyond preparing students for the labor market, creative thinking in education contributes to students’ holistic development — it supports learning, problem solving and metacognitive skills through exploration and discovery, helping students to interpret information in personally meaningful ways,” the OECD said.
“Creative thinking helps prepare young people to adapt to a rapidly changing world that demands flexible and innovative workers.” — John Victor D. Ordoñez
