Charakterisierung kreativer Bearbeitungen offener Aufgaben von jungen Schulkindern

A contemporary task of mathematics education is to enable all students to develop their creativity when working on open tasks. To be specific, this means that they should be able to develop their fluency, flexibility, and originality. In this context, some studies show that even preschool and primary school children can become creative since they are generally open-minded and little influenced by learned (algorithmic) methods when working on mathematical tasks. But how can young school children’s task processing be characterized in terms of their individual mathematical creativity? This paper focuses on the creativity of 18 first-grade students as they work on two arithmetic open tasks. The analysis of their creative task processings using both category building and statistical methods indicated that the mathematics students were able to get creative. More specifically, the learners’ fluency, flexibility, and originality could be differentially characterized by the creation of continua that span the qualitative range of the individual creative abilities of first graders. These findings can serve mathematics education researchers (and, prospectively, mathematics teachers) as starting point for observing and developing the individual mathematical creativity of students working on open tasks.