Measurement of creative teaching in mathematics class

Abstract

The current study serves two main purposes: (1) proposing a framework suggesting several conditions that mathematics teachers should establish to increase student creativity, and (2) developing and validating a scale based on the framework, aimed at measuring to what extent mathematics teachers establish a learning environment for their students to foster creativity. The analysis benefited from Sternberg's Investment Theory of Creativity and Cropley's framework in addition to other studies on creativity when developing the scale. The participants consisted of two groups of mathematics teachers. Data from the first group (n = 423) were used for exploratory factor analysis. The second group (n = 410) were used for confirmatory factor analysis. Based on results of the exploratory factor analysis, 5 items were removed from the scale. Results of confirmatory factor analysis supported the construct validity of the trimmed scale. Based on these results, there is evidence that the scale can be employed confidently to measure different dimensions of creativity-fostering behaviors of mathematics teachers.