Study Of Middle School Students Math Divergent Thinking Ability

The divergent thinking is a kind of thinking character, which is a radiate thinking of finding out the solution to a problem according to the given information in different ways or from more than one point of view. Its main features are fluency, flexibility and originality. It plays an important role in human's creative thinking activities. Since sciences and technologies are developed nowadays, it should lay a stress on the open-ended teaching in education, especially in mathematics teaching, to develop the students' capacity of divergent thinking. With the implementing of The New Standard of Mathematical Course in our country, it will become more and more important for us to raise the capacity of divergent thinking in mathematics teaching.In learning mathematics, the divergent thinking consists in when settling a question a person is good at thinking up much relative information about it in a wink, making logical inference of it, being able to transform it into an equivalent form, or creating some original solutions to it. Some study shows that the mathematics teaching method bears a close relationship to the development of students' capacity of divergent thinking.In this thesis, we will use the three features of divergent thinking as measuring criterion of our study and describe two experiments on our program. We will present the current situation and development of middle school students' divergent thinking in mathematics. We will also study the difference of divergent mathematics thinking between middle school students and how to train them, and so on. The aim of this thesis is to reveal the reality of middle school students' divergent mathematics thinking, to research out the reason why there is a difference between them and to suggest the method of training divergent mathematics thinking for middle school students.The conclusion of our study can be stated as follows: There is, in the current education system, an inverted V-sign trend in the development of capacity of middle school students' divergent mathematics thinking. There is little difference between man and woman students in middle schools in the capacity. Poor-mathematics students are at a much lower level than that of the average or the best students in the capacity of divergent mathematics thinking. There is a serious phenomenon of favor for courses in senior middle schools not in junior middle schools. Training by open-ended mathematical question can efficiently improve the capacity of students' divergent thinking in mathematics but can't help increase mathematical achievement under the current mathematics evaluate system.Our study shows also that the grade two students in junior middle schools are the fittest for training divergent mathematics thinking. Currently, there's a serious lack of training in divergent mathematical thinking in senior middle schools and it should be strengthened urgently. More training should be laid on the poor-mathematics students in junior middle schools. The prejudice against woman students in mathematics learning must be dispelled and their confidence of being able to learn mathematics well should be strengthened. The stress on the teaching of open-ended mathematics questions should be placed in order to raise divergent thinking in mathematics.