Higher Order Thinking in Mathematics and Identification of Mathematically Gifted Students

Please find below the invitation to a lecture by Prof. Demetra Pitta-Pantazi, University of Cyprus - an international expert on mathematical creativity, giftedness, and higher order thinking.

Her talk addresses all researchers and teachers with a general interest in creativity, giftedness, and higher order thinking. It will focus on research in mathematics education in particular, but will even address these topics in a more general perspective.

Summary

During this presentation I will show the results of two research studies: The first study addresses the concept of Higher Order Thinking in Mathematics. The importance of developing Higher Order Thinking in Mathematics has been an issue of discussion for more than thirty years. However, so far there is no common formulation of higher order thinking in mathematics. During the 1980’s the Iowa Department of Education (1989) suggested the Integrated Thinking Model according to which higher order thinking is a combination of Basic, Critical, Creative and Complex Thinking processes. This study aims to address this issue by investigating whether such a formulation can be endorsed for mathematics and whether it can be empirically validated with 691 primary school students using structural equation modeling. The analysis provides support, to a large extent, to the assumptions of this model. Based on the findings, implications regarding the development of higher order thinking are discussed. The second study proposes a new tool for the identification of mathematically gifted students. I will present the theoretical background which formed the basis for the development of this identification tool. Then, I will describe the tool and procedure followed for the identification of mathematically gifted students. Finally, I will discuss the results yielded by the implementation of the identification tool to 360 elementary school students.

Welcome!