Students’ Creative Thinking Ability in Solving Open-Ended Questions

Abstract

Students must be able to think creatively to deal with problems in the 21 st century. The aim of this study is to analyse the students' creative thinking skills in order to solve the open problems on algebraic operation material. The type of this study is qualitative descriptive study which used interview and test in collecting the data. There were seventh grade students at SMP IT Nur Hidayah as the subject of this study. There are three stages in analysing data of the study, including: data reduction, data collection, data presentation, and data conclusions. The findings of this study showed that the fluency aspect is only fulfilled by students with high mathematical abilities, while students with low mathematical abilities have not been achieved in solving the third problem. Further, only students with high mathematical abilities who can achieve the aspect of flexibility. Those students can explain well and give the reason properly how to get a written answer solution in solving the question. The students with high mathematical abilities also can achieve the originality aspect. In contrast, students with low mathematical abilities have difficulties in understanding the question and it makes them have no unique idea in answering the given question.