Educating Grade 6 students for higher-order thinking and its influence on creativity

Abstract

Educating students for higher-order thinking provides them with tools that turn them into more critical thinkers. This supports them in overcoming life problems that they encounter, as well as becoming an integral part of the society. This students’ education is attended to by educational organisations that emphasise the positive consequences of educating students for higher-order thinking, including creative thinking. One way to do that is through educational programmes that educate for higher-order thinking. One such programme is the Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT) thinking programme. The present research intended to examine the effect of the participation of Grade 6 students in a CoRT programme on their creative thinking. Fifty-three students participated in the research; 27 participated in a CoRT programme, while 26 did not participate in such programme. The ANCOVA test showed that the students who participated in the CoRT programme outperformed significantly, in creative thinking, the students who did not. Moreover, the students in the CoRT programme whose achievement scores were between 86 and 100 outperformed significantly the other achievement groups of students. Furthermore, students with reported high ability outperformed significantly the other ability groups of students. The results did not show statistically significant differences in students’ creativity attributed to gender.

Self-efficacy in creativity and curiosity as predicting creative emotions

“…Though a plenty of research has been done on emotions as impacting creativity (Sas & Zhang, 2010), little research has been done on self-efficacy and curiosity as impacting creative emotions in mathematical problem solving, where we, in the present paper, attempt to do so. This will enable educators to have means for encouraging creative emotions, which will encourage students' creativity in mathematical problem solving, and, as such, will prepare them for the twenty-one century skills (Daher, Tabaja-Kidan & Gierdien, 2017).…”

Sikap dan Kesediaan Pelajar Tingkatan Empat Terhadap Perlaksanaan Kemahiran Berfikir Aras Tinggi dalam Pembelajaran Matematik

“…Selain itu, penelitian terhadap kajian-kajian lepas mendapati bahawa terdapat kajian yang mengenal pasti wujudnya perbezaan sikap dan kesediaan dari aspek jantina (Deringol, 2018; Elci, 2017) dan terdapat juga kajian yang telah mengenal pasti tidak terdapat perbezaan sikap dan kesediaan dari aspek jantina (Daher et al, 2017;Demirel et al, 2015;Riadi et al, 2019) dalam pengajaran dan pembelajaran yang berasaskan KBAT. Perbezaan dari segi hasil dapatan yang tidak selari ini juga telah mewujudkan keperluan untuk melakukan kajian bagi menentukan perbezaan berdasarkan faktor jantina berkaitan dengan tahap sikap dan kesediaan pelajar dalam menjalani pengajaran dan pembelajaran berasaskan KBAT di sekolah.…”

“…Hal ini menggambarkan bahawa faktor jantina bukan merupakan faktor yang mempunyai pengaruh yang besar terhadap kesediaan pelajar Tingkatan 4 terhadap perlaksanaan KBAT dalam mata pelajaran matematik. Dapatan ini adalah selari dengan beberapa kajian yang turut mendapati tidak terdapat perbezaan kesediaan berdasarkan faktor jantina terhadap mata pelajaran matematik yang diintegrasikan dengan KBAT (Daher et al, 2017;Demirel et al, 2015;Riadi et al, 2019).…”

The State of South African Mathematics Education: Situating the Hidden Promise of Multiple-solution Tasks

“…MSTs encourage learners to use different strategies to solve mathematical problems and prove to improve their success in future mathematical problem-solving (Erbas & Okur, 2012). Encouraging learners to pursue multiple solutions to mathematical problems can improve their effectiveness and flexibility in solving such problems (Daher, Tabaja-Kidan, & Gierdien, 2017;Levav-Waynberg & Leikin, 2012a, 2012bStanislaw & Krug, 2014) even though it does not always affect their performance in mathematics (Schindler et al, 2018;Schukajlow, Krug, & Rakoczy, 2015). Furthermore, utilising MSTs allows more potentially creative learners to present their creative solutions to problems (Levav-Waynberg & Leikin, 2012a;Sriraman & Dickman, 2017).…”

“…Much of the research on MSTs in South Africa is theoretical: the research focuses mainly on showing that a certain national examination problem (Samson, 2015(Samson, , 2017Samson & Kroon, 2019), Olympiad problem (Christison, 2019;De Villiers, 2016, or a competition problem (Pillay, 2017) have multiple solutions. Though South African researchers collaborate in global empirical studies investigating the effects of MSTs on learners (Daher et al, 2017) and there is a haphazard appearance of the phrase multiple solutions in empirical studies in South Africa (Mhlolo, 2017;Wessels, 2014), there is a lack of empirical studies on the role of MSTs in the South African mathematics education. I am currently not aware of any empirical study in the South African context on the role of MSTs in both teacher and learner education.…”