THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION ON STUDENTS’ CREATIVE THINKING SKILLS: PISA EVIDENCE USING PROPENSITY SCORE MATCHING

Identifying elements that enhance student creativity is essential for effective educational design. The rapid adoption of digital educational technologies (DETs) has become a key factor in this process. This study aims to present causal evidence on the impact of teachers’ use of digital technology in education on the creative thinking of 15-year-old students in two countries, characterized by contrasting levels of digital technology integration in upper-secondary school. Propensity score analysis was applied to nationally representative PISA 2022 datasets of Singapore (n=6,606 students in 164 schools) and Morocco (n=6,867 students in 178 schools) to obtain causal estimates conditional on specified confounding factors. This causal inference method, which is infrequently employed in educational research, assesses interventions via observational data, considering temporal precedence, yielding less biased estimates by mitigating disparities between treatment and control groups. The findings showed that DET use at schools did not significantly influence students’ creative thinking in Singapore, and surprisingly, it significantly decreased Moroccan students’ creative thinking. Sensitivity analysis corroborated the robustness of the treatment effect estimates. The generalizability of the results is limited to the genuine educational contexts of the countries. The findings suggest that educational policymakers should be cautious about over-investment and over-reliance on digital technologies without carefully optimizing educational and curricular design for technology-enhanced creativity. Keywords: digital technology, creative thinking, propensity score matching, comparative analysis