Creativity in mathematical learning: A model to explain the cognitive functioning of creative processes and provide general design requirements

The interest in creativity in mathematics education has increased in the last few years at all levels. Nevertheless, a comprehensive framework for creativity in mathematics education that supports the design of appropriate tasks is still missing. In this paper the connection between different elements coming from mathematics education and psychology is built to provide a theoretical model for the explanation of the cognitive functioning of creative processes. For this purpose, the creativity characteristics of originality and flexibility are used to categorize creative processes, then the defined categories are cognitively characterized by elements of conceptual blending theory. Finally, general requirements of task design to support creativity in mathematics education are developed, consistently with the introduced model. The model can be used for ‘navigating’ the existing literature and identifying redundancies and synergies between different theoretical approaches; it can also be intended as a tool for detecting and classifying instances of creativity. Moreover, the introduced design requirements allow to work in the direction of task design to stimulate and foster creativity in mathematics education.