Enhancing Higher Education: Differentiating the Curriculum and Instruction to Foster Mathematical Creativity and Motivation

There has been a notable number of respectable studies in mathematical creativity and its promotion in education with K-12 pupils. Nonetheless, when it comes to mathematics education in higher education, there is not a wide variety of studies. One can observe that the mathematics content in higher education is completely different from the K-12 level when it comes to its extent, the level of difficulty and complexity, and presentation. These differences, which may cause more inaccessibility of the content, often yield to monotone lecture-based teaching styles. This style limits creative thinking in students as it requires no additional deep thinking and work. Therefore, the aim of this study is to implement an instructional differentiation to enhance students' mathematical creativity and motivation toward math in higher education and to examine its effectiveness. To observe the impacts of instructional methods toward the improvement in mathematical creativity, the authors structured an activity-based course at a big R1 university in the United States. The participants filled out a self-assessment tool before and after the course regarding their attitude toward math and mathematical creativity. Moreover, the students provided response papers regarding their thoughts for the activity of each week. Quantitative data collected from the self-assessment tool indicated an improvement in the participants' attitude toward mathematics. With the qualitative data collected from the response papers, more comprehensive responses which demonstrate creative thinking in math were observed.