Uncovering creative metacognition patterns in TVET innovation education: insight from an epistemic network analysis of students’ self-reflective assessments

Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) increasingly position creativity as a teachable competence in innovation and entrepreneurship education, yet little is known about how Creative Metacognition (CMC) elements are structurally interconnected and activated to facilitate creativity in TVET learners. To address this gap, this study provides an exploratory epistemic network analysis on structural mapping of CMC in TVET innovation and entrepreneurship course. Forty TVET learners completed a three-stage authentic Creative Problem-Solving task focused on venture design for a remote region. Their self-reflective assessments were segmented into 1,506 theory-driven semantic fragments and coded into Creative Strengths (CS), Creative Restrictions (CR), and Creative Contextual Knowledge (CK). Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was employed to model the co-activation patterns and relational intensity among CMC elements. Results show that students with high scores exhibited a stronger connection between CS and CK, suggesting that contextual knowledge was framed as creative affordances. In contrast, low-scoring students demonstrated a stronger connection between CR and CK, suggesting that situational reasoning was more often associated with perceived barriers and may reflect constrained idea development despite contextual awareness. The study also provides evidence of associations between reflective CMC configurations and creative performance, offering implications for reflective scaffolding and TVET entrepreneurship task design.