Abstract
The purpose of the present investigation was to study the effects of strategy, mathematics anxiety and their interaction on mathematical creativity of school students. A total of 111 class IX students participated in the study. Out of which, 59 were taught with the strategy for fostering mathematical creativity developed during the study, and 52 were considered for the control group and continued with the routine mathematics classroom activities. The strategy for fostering mathematical creativity was found to be effective for developing mathematical creativity. However, mathematics anxiety was a crucial factor, as strategy for fostering mathematical creativity was found to be better suited to students with low mathematics anxiety than students with high mathematics anxiety when groups were matched with respect to pre-mathematical creativity. The study calls for the need to provide increased opportunities for students to increase competency in mathematical creativity.
Highlights
Creative thinking is rapidly becoming a common purpose throughout the world (Strom &Strom, 2002) and cultivating better creative thinking ability in students has become an important trend in educational revolution (Hwang, Chen, Dung & Yang, 2007)
An examination of the means indicated that students belonging to strategy for fostering mathematical creativity group had significantly (p< 0.01) greater adjusted mean score than students of traditional method of teaching mathematics
Strategy for fostering mathematical creativity was found to enhance mathematical creativity significantly and it was superior to traditional method in fostering mathematical creativity when groups were matched with respect to pre-mathematical creativity
Summary
Creative thinking is rapidly becoming a common purpose throughout the world Mathematics educators have acknowledged that problem-posing and problem-solving, along with overcoming fixation are the aspects necessary for the development of mathematical creativity (Hadamard, 1945; Aiken, 1973; Balka, 1974b; Krutetski, 1976; Haylock, 1987, 1987a, 1997; NCTM, 1989; Ernest, 1991; Silver, 1994, 1997; Silver, Mamona-Downs, Leung and Kenny, 1996; Becker and Shimada, 1997; Sriraman, 2005; Bolden, Harries and Newton, 2009). The review of the literature indicates that cooperative interaction has considerable impact on the stimulation of creativity (John-Steiner, 2000; Sriraman, 2005; Neumann, 2007; NCTM, 2000; Shriki, 2010) Keeping this in view, the strategy was designed on the premise that mathematical creativity can be fostered with the help problem posing and problem solving activities in a cooperative learning environment with proper feedback. The sample lessons based on strategy for fostering mathematical creativity are given in the Appendix B
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