Assessment of students’ creative thinking ability in mathematical tasks at senior secondary school level

The study was carried out to assess students’ creative thinking ability in mathematical tasks at senior secondary school level in Nsukka Education Zone of Enugu State, Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population of the study was six thousand three hundred and thirty (6330) Senior Secondary II (SS11) students in sixty one (61) governments’ owned secondary schools. The sample size of two hundred and thirty four (234) students was drawn using simple random sampling from 6 sampled schools. The instrument for data collection was a 20-item mathematical question (problem posing and open ended). The reliability coefficient of 0.81 was obtained using Kuder-Richardson (KR-20) formula. Data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer research questions 1 and 2 while the null hypotheses 1 and 2 was tested using t- test statistic at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that the achievement of students was not good enough as it is below average. It was recommended among others that students should be provided with opportunities to engage in struggling to solve mathematics problems which are ill posed or open ended. Solving such challenging mathematics problems could lead students to experience creativity in doing mathematics. The findings of the study have implications for teachers and all stakeholders of education that only creative teachers can train creative students