Investigating creativity-directed tasks in middle school mathematics curricula

Abstract

Abstract Developing students’ creative thinking abilities while learning mathematics has been recently emphasized by many scholars, with many nations including creative thinking in mathematics as one of their overarching curriculum goals. The first purpose of the present study is to develop a framework to identify what type of mathematical tasks promote the mathematical creativity of students. The second purpose is to analyze to what degree the most commonly used three middle school curricula (i.e., Eureka, The Go Math!, and CPM) in the U.S. include creativity-directed tasks in their textbooks using this framework. Analyzing 1,500 mathematical tasks in each curriculum revealed that different curricula emphasize different dimensions of the creativity-directed tasks categories (i.e., open-ended tasks, problem-posing, connections, extensions, visualizations, and communication) presented in the framework. The result also revealed that open-ended problems are more common in the 6th grade textbooks than 7th and 8th grade textbooks regardless of the three selected middle school mathematics curricula. The implication of this study is to guide teachers with the strength and weakness of textbooks in terms of their inclusiveness of creativity-directed tasks to inform their teaching. Additionally, it is critical for curriculum developers to pay particular attention in including tasks that supporting each category and subcategory proportionately across the three years of middle school rather than emphasizing a few of them in one grade and almost completely ignoring them in previous or later years.