Mathematical creativity in upper elementary school mathematics curricula

Abstract

Textbooks should promote creative tasks for teachers to enhance students' math skills through creative thinking, instead of relying on memorization of step-by-step procedures.The aim of this study is to analyze elementary school mathematics curricula commonly employed in the U.S., namely GoMath, enVision Math, Math Connects, MyMath, and Investigations. The selection of these curricula is based on their widespread usage, and the analysis seeks to evaluate their effectiveness in fostering the development of students' creative thinking skills. We employed Bicer et al.'s (2021) framework for creativity-directed tasks to analyze 1,000 mathematical tasks within each curriculum. The analysis unveiled that Eureka, followed by Investigations, incorporated a higher proportion of creativity-directed tasks compared to the remaining three curricula. For some categories and subcategories of creativity-directed tasks (e.g., communication, connection), the results are less varied across five curricula. The present study enables school districts, schools, and classroom teachers to know what curricula support the development of creative thinking of students by including various options of creativity-directed tasks in their upper elementary mathematics textbooks.