PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Examining Students’ Problem Posing Through a Creativity Framework
Page: 1483
Understanding how students pose problems can inform the development of posing activities to further enhance students’ understanding of mathematics. Analyzing students’ problem posing through the lens of mathematical creativity provides insight into the creative process of posing problems; namely, the cognitive tools students use to formulate questions. Three undergraduate students, enrolled in a developmental mathematics course, participated in a problem-posing intervention to examine the cognitive resources students used as the foundation for their mathematical problem posing. Session transcripts were analyzed using an analytical framework derived from an investment perspective on creativity, and identified resources were organized into two categories: mathematical knowledge and skills, and social interactions and experiences. Preliminary findings from the fifth session suggest that students associated the mathematical content of a posing task with previously encountered problems, as well as appealed to their familiarity with the situational context of the posing task.