Assessment News in Brief

PISA Working Toward Exam to Gauge Creative Thinking—Built by ACT

By Catherine Gewertz — September 25, 2018 1 min read
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When teenagers worldwide take PISA in 2021, they could face a new kind of test—one that aims to measure their creativity. And the maker of a major U.S. college admissions exam, ACT Inc., would build it.

ACT, which announced the deal last week, said the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based agency that administers PISA, chose ACT to design a “creative-thinking assessment” for worldwide use in 2021.

Fifteen-year-old students around the globe take the Program for International Student Assessment in math, science, and reading every three years. In the last testing cycle, 2015, about 540,000 students from 72 countries took the computer-based test.

Periodically, PISA adds a fourth domain to its lineup. In 2015, for instance, it added collaborative problem-solving. If enough OECD countries are interested, the creative-thinking test would take that fourth-domain slot in 2021.

A version of this article appeared in the September 26, 2018 edition of Education Week as PISA Working Toward Exam to Gauge Creative Thinking—Built by ACT

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