Promoting pupils’ creative thinking in primary school mathematics: A case study

Enriching Mathematics Education with Visual Arts: Effects on Elementary School Students’ Ability in Geometry and Visual Arts

“…We expected that implicitly and explicitly stimulating students to act creatively and think divergently (Sawyer, 2014), especially in integrated visual arts and geometry lessons, would lead to more improvement in students' geometrical creativity compared with students who did not receive such stimulation. Although we found in a qualitative case study that students expressed more mathematically creative ideas and solutions in classroom dialogues during the MACE lessons than they did during a regular mathematics lesson (Schoevers et al, 2019), one MACE lesson per week may not be enough to bring large improvement of students' geometrical creativity.…”

“…Furthermore, the ability to solve geometrical problems is considered important, since it is central to mathematics (Kolovou, 2011) and can be a way to construct new mathematical knowledge (Levav-Waynberg & Leikin, 2012). Problem solving requires creative thinking: students need to be able to combine known concepts, skills, procedures, and ideas from mathematics and other domains in a new way to solve the problem (Schoevers et al 2019), which can contribute to the construction of new knowledge and deeper understanding of geometrical concepts (Levav-Waynberg & Leikin, 2012;Warner et al, 2003). Based on these core aspects of geometry education, we defined geometrical ability in this study as students' ability to understand and explain geometric phenomena, to describe these phenomena by using geometrical vocabulary, and to creatively solve geometrical problems.…”

“…In addition, they are stimulated to use academic geometrical vocabulary, for example in reformulating students' thinking, to improve the geometrical vocabulary of their students (Henrichs & Leseman, 2014). To stimulate creativity, teachers are advised to create an open atmosphere in which students' ideas are central, to ask open and activating questions that invite students to generate multiple answers, and to be open to these ideas (Davies et al, 2014;Schoevers et al, 2019). Although this specific role of the teacher is explained in the MACE teaching manual, also, a PD program for teacher was designed to assist teachers in implementing the MACE lesson series in educational practice.…”

“…skills, procedures, and ideas in a new and meaningful way to solve the problem. This requires creative and flexible thinking (Schoevers et al, 2019;Warner, Alcock, Coppolo, & Davis, 2003), which is also considered important in other disciplines in elementary education, such as visual arts (Sawyer, 2014). However, in educational practice, most teachers do not provide many opportunities for students to act creatively in mathematics (Gravemeijer, 2007;Kolovou, 2011) and visual arts (Bresler, 1999;Elfland, 1976).…”

Prepare Primary School Students to Face the Technological Age: Mathematical Creativity and Spatial Ability

“…. M.,Lesemen, P. P. M., Slot, E. M., Bakker, A., Keijzer, R., & Kroesbergen, E. H. (2019). Promoting pupils' creativity thinking in primary school mathematics: A case study.…”