Nonik Indrawatiningsih, Masriyah, Yurizka Melia Sari, Yulia Izza El Milla, Nurus Saadah
Background and Objectives: Creativity is an essential competency for prospective mathematics teachers if they are to effectively meet the demands of modern education. In mathematics learning, creativity includes the ability to connect concepts, develop new learning methods, and create relevant and interesting materials. One’s attitude can be trained through context-based numeration task activities. The activity requires students to design numeration problems that are based on real situations. This process helps students develop creative thinking skills, such as generating new ideas (fluency), thinking flexibly, and creating original solutions, while also improving their understanding. This study aimed to provide an in-depth description of how prospective mathematics teachers design context-based posing numera tasks design in personal, socio-cultural, and scientific contexts, and to identify the types of creativity that emerge during the process of creating contextual story problems. Methodology: This study employed a qualitative case study approach to explore how prospective mathematics teachers develop creativity by designing context-based numeracy tasks in mathematics learning. This study included the participation of 32 prospective mathematics student-teachers from the Mathematics Education study program in one of the universities in East Java, Indonesia. Data were collected by having all prospective mathematics teachers collaboratively complete a task in which they designed numeracy problems. Main Results: The results of this study showed that the average achievement for the creativity indicators was 33.36% for both fluency and flexibility, and 33.33% for originality, based on the mathematical problems submitted by the participants. The analysis shows that 38.1% of the numeracy task designs are based on the context of understanding and application, while 23.8% are oriented toward the reasoning level. Overall, these findings indicate the need to strengthen the creativity and pedagogical competencies of prospective mathematics teachers, especially in terms of generating fluent, varied, and original problem ideas, and in developing problem designs that encourage students' mathematical reasoning. Discussions: The limited number of numeracy tasks designed at the reasoning level may be due to most prospective mathematics teachers preferring to create problems that are more structured and procedural, rather than those that encourage creative thinking and the development of diverse solution strategies. When the majority of tasks performed by students were still focused on comprehension and application, this showed that the ability to create analytical and reflective tasks was not well developed. In the long run, this attitude could cause students to fail in handling real-world situations that require numeracy-based problem-solving, data analysis, and logical argumentation. Conclusions: The study found that the limited number of numeracy tasks designed at the reasoning level may be due to most prospective mathematics teachers preferring to create structured, procedure-based problems rather than tasks that encourage creative thinking and the development of diverse solution strategies. Therefore, educators needed to provide strategies in mathematics learning to train student teachers in designing tasks that could explore the creativity of students by including context-based numeracy. These strategies should be the main focus in the education curriculum of prospective mathematics teachers. © 2025, Suranaree University of Technology. All rights reserved.
Mathematics Education Study Program, FMIPA, Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia
