The Effects Of Context Characteristics Of Mathematical Problems On Seventh Grade Students’ Creative Problem Solving

Developing students’creativity is one of the important goals of school education. In recent years, mathematic teaching reforms both in China and abroad are advocating "Problem-based learning". PBL emphasizes on creating problem situation in classroom, thus providing good opportunity for developing students’creativity and creative thinking. As one of the key elements in PBL problem design, problem context not only attributes to students’achievements, but also has an effect on their creative performance. So it is of great value to investigate which kind of problem context can most stimulate students’creativity and creative thinking.To investigate how context characteristics affect students’creative problem solving,111seventh grade students were randomly divided into4groups and were given1of4mathematical problems. The problems differed in terms of context familiarity and concreteness. After that, participants were asked to finish a questionnaire with items measuring their cognitive involvement and cognitive load during creative problem solving. This aimed at investigating whether cognitive involvement and cognitive load mediate the relationship between problem context and creative problem solving. Furthermore, all the results were obtained after controlling for the effects of participants’IQ and math achievements.Results indicate that:1) context familiarity of mathematical problems had no significant effect on students’creative problem solving;2) increasing context concreteness of mathematical problems could improve students’appropriateness in creative problem solving, while inhibit their originality and fluency;3) increasing context familiarity or concreteness could both improve students’cognitive involvement during creative problem solving, but this didn’t affect the relationship between context characteristics and creative problem solving;4) context familiarity and concreteness had no significant effect on students’cognitive load during creative problem solving. In a word, this study expanded the combined research of PBL and school creativity training, and also implied that instruction designer should choose proper problem design strategy according to the goals.