Digital Inequality, School Climate and Creative Thinking among Fifteen-Year-Olds in Morocco

Digital resources may widen students’ opportunities to generate and refine ideas, but access does not guarantee productive educational use. This study examines how digital resources, use patterns and school climate are associated with creative-thinking performance among Moroccan fifteen-year-olds. We analyse the official PISA 2022 student, school and creative-thinking public-use files, comprising 6,867 students in 178 schools. All ten creative-thinking plausible values, the final student weight and 80 Fay-BRR replicate weights are propagated through survey-weighted contextual models. The extraction reproduces Morocco’s published creative-thinking mean (15.48; published rounded value 15) and Level 3-or-higher share (23.31%; published 23%). Greater ICT resource breadth was positively associated with performance after background and school adjustment. By contrast, the adjusted coefficient for perceived access quality was negative. Subject-related and enquiry-based ICT use also had negative adjusted gradients, whereas ICT use for school activities outside class was positive. Sense of belonging was consistently positive; disciplinary climate and mathematics teacher support were imprecisely estimated in the fully adjusted models. Socioeconomic interactions were not supported. Results therefore distinguish digital possession, setting and purpose. Morocco’s challenge extends beyond expanding access to converting digital resources into cognitively productive use through purposeful task design and environments that support students’ sense of belonging. The cross-sectional estimates represent associations and should not be interpreted as evidence of causal relationships.