The impact of an exploratory approach in teaching mathematics to students’ creative thinking abilities

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of an exploratory approach on the creative thinking abilities of Junior High School students in Bengkulu City. This type of research is experimental research with Posttest-Only Control Group Design. The research sample is 87 students of 8th grade at SMPN 1, SMPN 11, and MTs Ja-Al Haq in the second semester of 2019/2020 Academic Year. Based on the Kruskal_Wallis H. test, the asymp value is 0.00 smaller than 0.05, so there is differences in students’ creative thinking abilities, which is taught by using an exploration approach to teaching mathematics in high, middle and lower level schools. The average value of students’ creative thinking skills from each school level is as follows: upper level school is 63.34; middle level schools is 59.38, and lower level school is 49.27. The ability to think creatively High School Junior high level students better than lower school students. The ability to think creatively of middle level Junior High School students is better than lower level school students. However, based on the Mann-Whitney test, a significance value of 0.489 is greater than 0.05 between the ablitiy of the creative thinking of high school students and middle school students. So, there is no difference in the ability to think creatively High School Junior high school students with middle school students.