An Analysis Of Primary School Students’ Creative Thinking In Solving Open-Ended Problems

In recent years,the cultivation of problem-solving ability and creative thinking has been attached great importance by the international mathematics education group.Open-ended problem plays an important role in improving students’ creative thinking.And also an important way to evaluate students’ creative thinking.However,in the actual teaching,the role of open-ended problem in mathematics learning has not been well played,the teaching of open-ended problem is still superficial and there’s no in-depth analysis of the performance of students’ creative thinking in the process of solving open-ended problems.Hence,this study mainly focuses on the following problems.Firstly,how is the performance of students’,fluency of creative thinking in solving open-ended problems,can students explore multiple answers or solutions;Secondly,how is the performance of students’ flexibility of creative thinking in solving open-ended problems,can students analyze problems from different perspectives and solve problems in different ways;Thirdly,how is the performance of students’ originality of creative thinking in solving open-ended problems,are there any students using unusual problem-solving methods.Forth,is there a certain correlation among the three dimensions of creative thinking fluency,flexibility and originality in open problem solving;Fifth,whether there are gender differences in creative thinking in solving open problems.In order to answer above questions,83 students from three classes of grade 5 in a J primary school in Shanghai participated in this research.This study used test methods,observations and case analysis methods to investigate and analyze the performance of students’ creative thinking in solving open-ended problems.The research conclusions are as follows.Firstly,the vast majority of students can solve problems in many ways,showing good fluency.Secondly,there are some similarities in students’ problem-solving methods,showing some deficiencies in flexibility.Thirdly,most of the students show low scores in the originality of thinking,while few of them have high scores.Forth,there are significant correlations among the three dimensions of creative thinking In addition,there was no significant difference in creative thinking between male and female students.Finally,students’ performance of creative thinking in different types of open-ended problems is also differentAt the end of this study,based on the above research conclusions,the author put forward some relevant teaching suggestions,and has carried on the research reflection,also proposed research prospects.