A 2025 study of Australian students found that creativity predicted literacy and numeracy scores even after GPA and personality were accounted for — explaining an additional 7.5% of literacy performance and 9.2% of numeracy, suggesting creative thinking isn't a distraction from academic achievement but part of it.

Creativity is often treated as the pleasant extra that schools can afford only after the serious work of literacy and numeracy is done. A 2025 study in Thinking Skills and Creativity found a pattern that makes that hierarchy harder to defend.

Among Australian secondary students, creativity-related measures explained an additional 7.5 per cent of the variance in national literacy scores after grade point average and personality were included. For numeracy, they explained another 9.2 per cent. The results suggest that some forms of creative thinking carry information about academic performance that conventional predictors miss.

There is an essential statistical boundary. The percentages do not mean creativity lifted an individual student’s literacy score by 7.5 per cent or numeracy score by 9.2 per cent. They are percentage-point increases in the variation explained by regression models. And because this was an observational study, “predicted” does not mean “caused”.

One school, six rounds of measurement

The broader project began around 2016 with 1,053 students aged 15 to 18 at a single Australian school. Across six time points over roughly two years, participants completed personality questionnaires, creativity self-reports and performance tasks. The school supplied their latest GPA and historical results from Australia’s National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy, known as NAPLAN.

NAPLAN is a nationwide assessment of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The official NAPLAN guidance says it covers reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy. It is one element of school assessment, not a measure of overall school quality or the whole of a child’s ability.

The sample became smaller as the analysis demanded complete records. Literacy scores existed for 637 students and numeracy scores for 627, but creativity, personality, GPA and test data did not overlap for everyone. The final literacy regression used 216 students; the numeracy model used 212. That is the relevant sample when judging the headline percentages.

Creativity was not a single score

The research team used several approaches. Students rated their creativity in domains such as scholarly, scientific and artistic work. They reported their intellectual risk-taking, or willingness to engage with uncertain ideas and risk mistakes. They also completed verbal and mathematical production tasks scored for originality by external raters.

A divergent-thinking exercise asked hypothetical “what if” questions. Its main measure was flexibility: how many different categories appeared across a student’s responses. Producing consequences about transport, family life and the environment, for example, would show more flexibility than offering several closely related transport answers.

This breadth matters because different measures can point in different directions. Creativity is not a substance that students simply possess in greater or smaller amounts. The OECD’s creative-thinking framework similarly separates generating diverse ideas, generating original ones, and evaluating and improving ideas across different contexts.

Flexible thinking mattered for literacy

The researchers built the models in stages. For literacy, GPA alone explained 19.3 per cent of the variation in NAPLAN scores. Adding three personality traits, with openness emerging as the significant one, increased the total to 23.1 per cent. Once all creativity-related blocks were entered, the full model explained 30.6 per cent.

The difference between 23.1 and 30.6 is the reported 7.5 percentage points. Yet not every creativity measure earned credit. Divergent-thinking flexibility was the clear creative predictor, while the final verbal-creativity task was not independently significant. Nor did the broad creativity self-reports contribute a significant increase at their stage.

That distinction is easy to lose in the headline. The 7.5 per cent refers to the creativity-related variables entered from the third stage onwards, not to a single creativity score. Most of the literacy increase arrived when flexibility entered at the fourth stage. The model therefore supports a specific association more strongly than a claim that every creative trait improves literacy.

One possible interpretation is that moving among categories of ideas helps with reading, writing and language tasks requiring several perspectives. That is plausible, but the study did not test the mechanism. It measured a relationship between students’ flexibility scores and their earlier NAPLAN performance.

Numeracy told a different story

For numeracy, GPA explained 17.7 per cent of score variation. Personality increased that to 20.6 per cent. The final model reached 29.8 per cent, making the contribution from the creativity-related blocks 9.2 percentage points.

Here the relevant qualities were domain-specific. Higher mathematical creativity and higher self-reported scientific creativity predicted stronger numeracy scores. Divergent-thinking flexibility, so useful in the literacy model, did not add predictive value.

Intellectual risk-taking also produced an awkward result for any simple “more creativity is always better” story. It predicted lower numeracy scores after the other variables were considered. The authors thought this might partly reflect overlap with openness, but it could also fit the demands of a structured test in which adventurous answers are less useful than precise ones. Either account needs more evidence.

In numerical terms, the creativity self-reports increased explained variance by 6.2 percentage points, mathematical creativity added three more, and divergent-thinking flexibility added essentially nothing. That pattern makes the 9.2 per cent total informative, but only when its positive and negative ingredients remain visible.

The distinction echoes a 2023 analysis of Australian university admission rankings from the same broader project. There, a combination of creativity measures explained additional ATAR variation beyond GPA and personality. The new paper is a conceptual extension using lower-stakes NAPLAN outcomes.

The wider evidence points the same way

The finding does not stand alone. A meta-analysis of creativity and academic achievement found a modest positive association with school grades and a somewhat larger one with standardised tests. Correlations averaged 0.19 for grades and 0.28 for test scores across the included evidence.

International assessment now treats creativity as measurable alongside conventional subjects. In 2022, PISA assessed creative thinking among 15-year-olds for the first time. The OECD reported that many systems strong in creative thinking were also strong in mathematics, reading and science. Australia was among the high performers. Cross-country results cannot explain the Australian school study, but they weaken the assumption that creative and academic competence naturally pull apart.

Academic achievement is always multiply determined. Previous work has found persistence predicting grades even after ability, a distinction reflected in research on grit, SAT scores and GPA. The present study asks whether creative performance also contributes distinct information. Within its models, it did.

Useful evidence, with firm limits

The study did not randomly assign creativity lessons, so it cannot show that teaching creative thinking caused higher NAPLAN scores. The direction may partly run the other way. Strong academic skills could support performance on creative tasks, while motivation, teaching quality, family background or other unmeasured factors could influence both.

All participants came from one school in one country. Attrition reduced the complete-case models to just over 200 students, and the researchers selected predictors partly from an earlier analysis of this dataset. The authors themselves called for replication with different assessments, age groups, schools and cultures. A University of South Australia account of the research captures its practical appeal, but the design does not yet prove that a particular classroom programme will improve test performance.

What it does show is more precise. In this group, flexibility added useful information about literacy, while mathematical and scientific creativity added information about numeracy. Creativity was not a distraction left over after the “real” predictors had done their work. It was part of the academic pattern, though which part depended on the subject and the way creativity was measured.