# Exploring the impact of ICT interaction on students’ creative thinking across performance levels: an explainable AI perspective

## TL;DR

This study explores how students' use of technology affects their creative thinking, using AI to identify patterns across different performance levels.

## Contribution

The study introduces an explainable AI approach to uncover how ICT behaviors influence creative thinking across performance levels.

## Key findings

- ICT impacts creative thinking more through intentional and complex engagement than frequency of use.
- High-performing students show strategic ICT behaviors, while low-performing students show recreational or unethical patterns.
- Emotional regulation, media literacy, and digital ethics are key factors in ICT-related creative thinking.

## Abstract

This study uses the PISA 2022 ICT questionnaire to examine how students’ ICT interaction behaviours in digital environments predict creative thinking across low, medium, and high performance levels (Class 0–2). Using multi-class classification models with Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), we identify key ICT-related predictors spanning information retrieval, digital content creation, media evaluation, collaborative communication, and emotional response, with largely nonlinear and interactive effects. Results show that ICT influences creative thinking less through usage frequency than through the intentionality and complexity of ICT engagement and its sociocultural alignment. High-performing students tend to display more functional and strategic ICT behaviours, whereas low-performing students more often show superficial, recreational, or potentially unethical patterns, with emotional regulation, media literacy, and digital ethics emerging as salient factors. These findings clarify performance-specific ICT–creativity profiles and support targeted digital literacy interventions tailored to students at different ability levels.