Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop a program to cultivate mathematical creativity based on open-ended problem and to investigate its effect. The major features of this innovative program are (a) breaking up fixations, (b) multiple answers, (c) various strategies, (d) problem posing, (e) exploring strategies, (f) selecting and estimating, (g) active exploration through open-ended problems. 20 units for 7th grade mathematics were developed. This study hypothesizes that experimental students may develop more divergent thinking abilities than their traditional counterparts. The participants were 7th grade students attending middle schools in Seoul. Instruments were pre and post tests to measure mainly divergent thinking skills through open-ended problems. The results indicated that the experimental students achieved better than the comparison students on overall and each component of fluency, flexibility, and originality of divergent thinking skills, when deleting the effect of covariance of the pretest. The developed program can be a useful resource for teachers to use in enhancing their students' creative thinking skills. Further this open-ended approach can be served as a model to implement in classes. This study suggests that further investigations are needed in order to examine effects on affective domains such as motivation and task perseverance which are also considered as important factors of creativity.

Keywords

• open-ended problems;
• mathematical creativity

• 개방형 문제;
• 수학적 창의력;