How teachers’ creative pedagogies shape students’ creative thinking skills: a multilevel moderated mediation analysis from East Asia

East Asian teachers’ pedagogical practices, rooted in Confucian heritage cultures, have sparked enduring debates about whether these pedagogies foster or impede creative thinking skills. This study addresses the debate by employing a multilevel moderated mediation model to examine how teachers’ creative pedagogies shape students’ creative thinking skills, with creative self-efficacy serving as the mediator and school openness to creativity as the moderator. Data were collected from 20,824 15-year-old students, who participated in PISA 2022, across 501 secondary schools in Hong Kong (China), Macao (China), Singapore, and South Korea. The results revealed some striking regional disparities. In Hong Kong (China) and Macao (China), creative pedagogies exhibited a significant positive direct effect on creative thinking skills, while negative effects were observed in Singapore and South Korea. Notably, creative self-efficacy consistently exerted a partial mediating role across all regions, with this mediating effect amplified in schools with higher openness to creativity in Hong Kong (China) and Singapore, but attenuated in Macao (China) and South Korea. The findings have implications for tailoring policies to reconcile creative pedagogies with regional norms and inspire future research on Confucian cultural variations in these mechanisms within East Asian educational contexts.