Creative mathematical thinking in primary education clasrooms: didactic enviroments that favor its development
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31619/caledu.n50.717Keywords:
creativity, didactic environments, mathematics, mathematical classroom, mathematics educationAbstract
Mathematical creativity is related to the ability to create ideas, solutions or questions that are novel, from the perspective of who generates them. The development of this skill is relevant in mathematics at both the professional and grade school level. This article shows the results of a study which sought to determine the influence of didactic environments on students" mathematical creativity. To this end, we evaluated the mathematical creativity of 576 5th grade students, from 21 cohorts and 17 schools in Santiago de Chile, and used multilevel models to investigate the effect of different teaching environments. The results show that the classroom effect helps to explain 16% of the total variance in the mathematical creativity of the participating students. Once the control variables "Socioeconomic Level", "Gender" and "Simce" (standardized test results) were incorporated, it was observed that those students who were in a didactic environment with teaching characterized by actively involving them in the construction of ideas and whose teachers showed a greater capacity to vary the difficulty of the mathematical problems, obtained significantly higher scores of mathematical creativity. These findings reveal the importance of classroom experiences for the development of creative mathematical thinking.
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