The role of congruence: a response surface analysis of family-school alignment in predicting creative thinking.

Background/objectives: Despite widespread acknowledgment that school and home environments must be aligned to support cognitive development, the question of how their congruence or incongruence predicts creativity has received little empirical attention. Methods: Drawing on data from the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment, this study employed multilevel cubic polynomial regression and response surface analysis (RSA), with students nested within countries to examine how three congruence pairs: (1) environmental support, (2) behavioral engagement and (3) value orientation predict creative thinking performance controlling for mathematics, science and reading achievement and socioeconomic status. Results: Results revealed that aligned increases along the line of congruence were associated with higher creative thinking in the environmental support and value orientation, but with lower creative thinking in the behavioral engagement model where uniformly high participation in both activity domains was associated with the poorest outcomes. The quadratic congruence parameter was negative and significant, indicating diminishing rather than accelerating returns to congruence. Regarding compensatory mechanisms, the family environment partially buffered school deficiencies, an excess of out-of-school over in-school activity was associated with lower scores than the reverse imbalance and student openness to experience substantially compensated for a low school openness culture, whereas the reverse configurations conferred no comparable advantage. Across all three models the congruence terms accounted for considerably more of the within-country than the between-country variance. The full models explained 55% of the within-country and 78-80% of the between-country variance; once achievement and socioeconomic status were controlled, the unique contribution of the congruence terms ranged from 3.0 to 6.7%. Conclusion: These findings support a dynamic, configural view of creativity as an emergent outcome of multi-contextual fit and underscore the need for integrated intervention designs. The asymmetric compensatory patterns revealed demonstrate that creativity support systems are not interchangeable across contexts and that targeted, context-sensitive strategies are necessary to foster creative potential. Because the congruence effects operate at the level of the individual student rather than the education system, and are modest in magnitude, they identify a direction for such strategies rather than a basis for redesigning provision around them.