Effects of the application of open-ended tasks in mathematics teaching

Abstract

Learning process, especially during mathematics lesson, is accomplished thanks to the tasks that students are confronted with. A focus of this paper is on open tasks. Its aim is to depict the significance of the open tasks in mathematics teaching with regard to the teachers' work with them. Furthermore, the paper presents the findings about the mindsets of 60 Slovak teachers gained through the online questionnaire. The results indicate that a lot of teachers either do not believe that their students can change their intelligence quotient or cannot decide about this matter. Again, the questionnaire was chosen as the research method to monitor the motivation of students to solve the open tasks. The familiarity of students with this type of tasks seems to raise their interest in solving the open tasks. In addition, few ways of modifying the closed task to the open one are presented in the paper.