CREATIVITY THROUGH CHALLENGING LEARNING TASKS (original) (raw)

2014, The Future of Mathematics Education in a Connected World Conference

Tasks proposed to students influence greatly what they learn. These are of great importance, especially if they lead to an understanding of structural and mathematical concepts and encourage fluency, flexibility and originality as components of creative thinking. So, it is important to understand the performance of future teachers in problem solving and posing tasks that foster creativity and identify tasks that can help achieve this goal. So we developed a study, still ongoing, in the context of initial teacher education, that seeks to identify math tasks to enhance students’ creativity. We used a qualitative approach and data was collected in a holistic, descriptive and interpretative way. Our preliminary findings, based on future teachers productions, indicate that the tasks used, identify some dimensions of creativity in future teachers.