Jigsaw Activity On Creative Thinking:A Case Study Of Junior High School Student In China

"Mathematical Curriculum Standards for Full-time Compulsory Education? in China clearly points out: "the cultivation of innovative consciousness is the basic task of modern mathematical education.Mathematical activities should encourage the creative thinking." Chongde Lin,a professor of Beijing Normal University,believes that creative mathematical activities can help to enhance the students' creative thinking in mathematics learning.Creative thinking is an important component of creative thinking.The eighth-graders,who have gained a basic understanding of graphic shapes but haven't studied the nature yet,are at the critical stage of formation the creative thinking.J.P.Guilford,a famous American psychologist,proposed the concept of divergent thinking: the ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem;creativity.He associated divergent thinking with creativity,appointed it has several characteristics: fluency,flexibility and originality.This study designed a series of Jigsaw activities based on its theory,that is,an operational activity that explores new graphic information by assembling graphics with geometric graphics board.We noticed the variation of creative thinking through a long period of Jigsaw activities,and then try to explain how it works through this case study.Combined with the results of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in from of figural(Figural TTCT)of 48 eighth-grade students in a junior high school in Chongqing China,three students with high,medium and low levels of creative thinking respectively were selected as object of the case study.Then the author conducted a two-month Jigsaw training activities for these three students and recorded the whole process with camera.The behavior of those students in origami activities can directly reflect their changes in creative thinking.It can be observed obviously that creative thinking of the object students have been greatly improved through the Jigsaw activities.Figural TTCT was taken by the whole class again after two months.The results of this study were obtained by comparing the variation of the creative thinking of the three students with that of the whole class in pre-post-test.Variance analysis has been down,and the result shows significant difference between the students trained by Jigsaw activities and the others who didn't.It is found that Jigsaw activities have significant impacts on creative thinking of eighthgrade students,with the impact on that of low level students being the greatest and other level ones being obvious as well.