Resource Adequacy and Uneven Equity Gradients in Creative Thinking: A Multilevel Analysis of PISA 2022 Indonesia

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Background Creative thinking has become a priority outcome in international education assessment, yet the school level conditions that predict it in low performing systems remain poorly understood. Methods This study applied two level hierarchical linear modelling to the PISA 2022 Indonesian sample (N = 12340 students in 404 schools) to estimate direct and indirect effects of school creative program availability, school creative environment, and educational resource shortage on student creative thinking, and to test whether the relationship between socioeconomic status and creative thinking is uniform across schools. Creative self-efficacy was tested as a within school mediator using the 2-1-1 multilevel framework, with all ten plausible values pooled via Rubin’s rules and indirect effects evaluated through Monte Carlo simulation. Results The null model yielded an intraclass correlation of .242, indicating that 24.2% of creative thinking variance lies between schools. In the full model, educational resource shortage was the only school level predictor to reach conventional significance (β = −0.991, p = .043). School creative program availability and school creative environment showed positive point estimates of comparable magnitude (β = 0.852 and 0.834, respectively), but their confidence intervals were wide enough to include both a meaningful effect and no effect at all, a direct consequence of the limited number of schools available at Level 2 rather than evidence that either predictor is unimportant. Creative self-efficacy did not mediate any school level effect, with Monte Carlo intervals for both indirect paths fully including zero. A likelihood ratio test further showed that the relationship between socioeconomic status and creative thinking varies significantly across schools (p &lt; .001), indicating an uneven equity gradient across the Indonesian school system. Conclusions Resource adequacy appears to be a precondition for creative thinking, the self-efficacy pathway documented in high performing East Asian systems is not yet active in this lower performing context, and equity in creative thinking outcomes is itself school dependent rather than fixed. Practical implications for low performing Asia Pacific systems are discussed.</p>