From text understanding to creativity: Examining the interplay of metacognition, self-efficacy, reading comprehension, and divergent thinking in students’ problem-solving performance

Fostering students’ problem-solving skills is a challenge that requires understanding various cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors. However, the combined role of these potential correlates has not yet been studied comprehensively. The present cross-sectional study aimed to explore the interplay between metacognitive skills, self-efficacy, text-based comprehension, and divergent thinking in relation to students’ ill-defined problem-solving performance. A total of 242 undergraduate students (M_age = 20.74, 223 female) of psychology and pedagogy participated in the study. The results showed that higher levels of text-based comprehension of the passage’s content, metacognitive skills, and divergent thinking were associated with greater quality and originality of solutions in an ill-defined problem-solving task. Although reading self-efficacy and creative self-efficacy were not directly associated with problem-solving performance, they showed significant indirect associations: reading self-efficacy was associated with better problem-solving accuracy via enhanced text-based comprehension, and creative self-efficacy with more novel solutions through increased divergent thinking. These findings provide insights into cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors that may support the development of problem-solving skills, with implications for educational practices.