Investigation of pre-service teachers' perceptions of mathematical creativity

This study aims to reveal pre-service elementary mathematics teachers' perceptions of mathematical creativity. The participants of the research consist of 17 elementary pre-service mathematics teachers. The research was conducted based on the phenomenological method, one of the qualitative research approaches. In this context, the Research Assignment Document prepared by the researcher was used as a data collection tool, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant through this document. The themes and codes were acquired from the data obtained using descriptive and content analysis. The study's findings show that pre-service teachers attach importance to open-ended questions containing more than one solution and can be expressed with more than one type of representation to support mathematical creativity. In addition, it was observed that pre-service teachers included problem-posing activities. It was determined that pre-service teachers associated creativity with thinking differently and mathematical creativity with generating different solutions. According to the pre-service teachers, the questions that are multiple-choice, focus only on procedural knowledge, have only one answer and one solution, pose an obstacle to supporting mathematical creativity. In line with these results, it was determined that the pre-service teachers confused mathematical creativity with other thinking skills and that the concepts of fluency, flexibility, and originality, which are the sub-dimensions of mathematical creativity, were not considered as a whole.