Abstract:

Creating an institutional environment that supports the development of students’ creative thinking is a critical foundation for building an education powerhouse. High-stakes testing (HST) has played an important role in improving educational quality and ensuring fairness, but it is also widely seen as a major constraint on creativity. Yet its actual effects on students’ creative thinking and the mechanisms behind them remain unclear. Drawing on the perspective of multiple institutional logics and data from PISA 2022, this study examined the effects and mechanisms of HST on students’ creative thinking by applying three-level hierarchical linear modeling, quantile regression, cross-level interaction, and mediation analysis.The findings revealed that (1) systems with more HST were more likely to have lower creativity scores; (2) the impact of HST was strongly differentiated across student groups, with more negative effects for students with lower cognitive ability, weaker creative thinking, and disadvantaged family backgrounds; (3) the negative impact of HST was also more pronounced for schools with lower educational quality and relatively scarce resources; (4) as intermediate organizations that transmitted institutional pressure, schools in high-stakes environments tended to increase “creative” activities, yet these activities were often formalistic and symbolic, and thus did not substantively enhance students’ creative thinking—even well-resourced schools tended to engage in such symbolic innovation practices. For China, these results underline the importance of advancing education evaluation reform, reducing the dominance of single-metric HST, and building a more diversified evaluation system that creates an environment supportive of cultivating innovative talents.

Key words: high-stakes testing, creative thinking, institutional logics, PISA