“like a Little Glimmer of Light”: Understanding and Validating Students’ Creative Processes

Abstract

As societies continue to evolve, creativity—particularly mathematical creativity—has become a crucial 21st-century skill. While prior research has primarily emphasized creative outcomes, the cognitive processes underlying mathematical creativity remain insufficiently understood. The aim of this study is to characterize the creative process of school students. In our study, 15 upper secondary school students worked on a creativity problem while wearing eye-tracking glasses and participated in a stimulated recall interview. Using a combined deductive–inductive analytic approach based in Hadamard’s stage model of creativity, we were able to characterize and develop a model of the students’ creative process. The model substantiates previous models, while also revealing additional phases as well as reinterpretations.

Keywords

mathematical creativitycreative processeye tracking (ET)Multiple Solution Tasks (MSTs)

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