Understanding Mathematical Creativity: A framework for assessment in the high school classroom.

Creativity in mathematics is often looked at as the exclusive domain of professional mathematicians. There have been few studies that have examined creativity in the high school classroom, particularly in its manifestation in students with exceptional mathematical abilities. One of the obstacles to the study of mathematical creativity is the ‘fuzziness’ of the construct of creativity. In this paper the notion of mathematical creativity is developed from literature in psychology. In particular the evolving systems model (Gruber & Wallace, 2000) is used to construct the case study of a ninth grade student and to assess his attempts to discover the structure of Steiner Triple Systems after working on several problems over a four-month period. The implications of this study for assessing students’ problem solving in the high school classrooms are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]