From leadership research to district action: How instructional leadership and creativity related factors shape students’ reading performance: evidence from a Bayesian multilevel mediation approach using PISA 2022 Türkiye data

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Introduction This study aims to examine the influences of student-level creativity characteristics, school-level creativity-supportive conditions, and instructional leadership on reading performance. Methods This study employed PISA 2022 data for Türkiye. A total of 7,250 students and 196 school principals’ data were analyzed by employing multilevel path analysis and Bayesian estimation. Missing data were addressed through Full Information Maximum Likelihood. We reported model fit indices in path analysis to validate our model. We conducted convergence checks, posterior predictive checks, and sensitivity analyses, and reported pooled values for the number of free parameters, the observed and replicated chi-square statistics, and the posterior predictive p-value (PPP) to validate our model in Bayesian estimation. Results Our results revealed that at the student level, the effect of creativity and openness to intellect on reading performance is mediated by curiosity and imagination. At the school level, none of the indirect effects of instructional leadership on reading performance—through a creative school environment, a culture of openness, or creative activities—were found to be significant. Another notable mechanism is that socioeconomic and cultural status (ESCS) has a direct and positive association with reading performance. While creativity, intellectual openness, and imagination are associated with socioeconomic status, curiosity seems to function as a relatively egalitarian internal source of motivation not shaped by socioeconomic advantage. The pattern at the school-level presents a notably different picture. Our school-level findings revealed that instructional leadership had a negative direct relationship with reading performance. Furthermore, the strong direct association of academic school selectivity with reading performance revealed that exam-focused school stratification in Turkey is the dominant structural factor determining achievement. Discussion Overall, this study revealed that the reading performance of Turkish students is shaped not directly from individual traits such as creativity–openness to intellect, but through motivational-cognitive mechanisms such as curiosity and imagination. The insignificance of the indirect paths of instructional leadership on reading through creative processes indicates that interventions aimed at improving reading should be designed not only around teaching cognitive skills but also around learning environments that spark curiosity and nurture imagination.

Study methods

We used a cross-sectional research design drawing on the PISA 2022 student and school datasets. In such designs, data on dependent, mediator, and independent variables were gathered at a single time point through the same questionnaire. The following section outlines the study’s data sources, sample characteristics, measurement approach, and analytical strategy.

Limitations

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A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Nermin Er Aydemir; Tuncer Fidan. How instructional leadership and creativity related factors shape students’ reading performance: evidence from a Bayesian multilevel mediation approach using PISA 2022 Türkiye data. Frontiers in Psychology (2026-09-17). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1907891

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.