Exploring Students’ Mathematical Creativity for the Concept of Enlarging and Shrinking through a Technologically Conjecturing Teaching

This study explored students' creativity performance in a regular mathematics classroom where a teacher incorporated IT tools into creativity-directed conjecturing teaching. The participants were the instructor and 21 sixth graders. The primary data included the cases and the conjectures generated by the individuals, groups, and the entire class, collected from ten lessons. The data analysis for students’ creativity in the creativity-directed conjecturing tasks and teaching involved classifying conjectures, establishing a coding framework, calculating the percentage of the whole-class conjectures, and scoring each conjecture with a score of 10, 1, and 0.1 for fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration, the four components of creativity. Additionally, the scores of each student's creativities were calculated. The study results indicated that IT tools integrated into creativity- directed conjecturing teaching were an approach for developing students' creativity in regular mathematics lessons and developing students' concepts of enlarging and shrinking by distinguishing distorted from non-distorted geometric shapes. The concept of enlarging and shrinking is beneficial to developing students' elaborative thinking when students are required to create geometric Picasso patterns with the IT tool integrated into the conjecturing teaching.