Abstract
Relationships between mathematical giftedness and mathematical creativity have been widely studied, but few studies are available for primary school age. For an investigation in this age group, it seems appropriate to use a content area that not only has high relevance for mathematics and special potentials for creativity, but also requires only a little knowledge and is easily accessible. We therefore investigated whether mathematically gifted primary school students differ from non-gifted ones in high creativity in dealing with mathematical patterns and structures. This question was explored in an interview study in which 24 third graders were asked to invent as many different figural patterns as possible, which enabled creative mathematical activity also by combining arithmetic and geometric aspects. A detailed qualitative analysis of the data revealed among other results several types of flexibility concerning the invention of patterns. The selection of students ensured that all participants performed well to very well in regular mathematics classes and that 14 of them could additionally be assumed to be mathematically gifted based on a specific test. This allowed a comparison of both subgroups. Results indicate a high correspondence between mathematical giftedness and mathematical creativity concerning the invention of figural patterns.
Highlights
(Mathematical) giftedness and creativity are constructs that are often mentioned in the same breath and whose relationships have been repeatedly investigated. (For an overview of possible relationships see Assmus & Fritzlar, 2018, for constructs specific to mathematics, or Sternberg and O’Hara (1999), for general constructs)
Relationships between mathematical creativity and mathematical achievement (Kattou et al, 2013; Schoevers et al, 2018) were predominantly studied and demonstrated, partly considering high-performers as mathematically gifted students (Kroesbergen et al, 2017), thereby suggesting conclusions regarding the relationship between giftedness and creativity
When students are considered to be mathematically gifted if they are able to meet strong mathematical challenges (Nolte & Pamperien, 2017), conventional achievement tests based on regular classroom content are not suitable for identifying mathematically gifted students
Summary
(Mathematical) giftedness and (mathematical) creativity are constructs that are often mentioned in the same breath and whose relationships have been repeatedly investigated. (For an overview of possible relationships see Assmus & Fritzlar, 2018, for constructs specific to mathematics, or Sternberg and O’Hara (1999), for general constructs). When students are considered to be mathematically gifted if they are able to meet strong mathematical challenges (Nolte & Pamperien, 2017), conventional achievement tests based on regular classroom content are not suitable for identifying mathematically gifted students With such a specific view of mathematical giftedness, to our knowledge there are no studies of possible relationships between mathematical giftedness and mathematical creativity in the primary school age range. For a characterization of mathematical creativity, common indicators from general creativity research are often used, namely fluency, flexibility, originality, and much more rarely, elaboration Another important indicator of general creativity is meaningfulness (for example in the case of artistic products) or usefulness (Gajda et al, 2017)
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