People sometimes gain a sudden idea through insight after being stuck on a problem. Researchers have been studying insight as a crucial component of creative problem-solving in the past decades. However, the role of insight in mathematical problem-solving remains unclear, while mathematics is essential in scientific development and ubiquitous in everyday life. In the current study, 46 Northwestern undergraduates used a note-taking application on an electronic tablet to solve mathematical problems. To understand how the solving process unfolds, we adapted the “experience sampling” procedure. The experimenter instructed the participants to report their experience of insights by drawing exclamation marks along their writings. If they found an answer to the problem, they reported how confident they thought their answer was correct. The materials used were from real-life mathematical educational resources with high solving rates and low familiarity to college students, selected based on a preliminary study (N=20). We predicted that 1) insights occur when people solve mathematical problems, possibly more than once within a single problem; 2) insights are positively associated with (correctly) solving rates and confidence levels in the correctness of the solutions. The results support these two predictions, and the association between positive outcomes (solving rates and confidence in the solutions) and insight aligns with previous literature on classical insight problems. This study does not only contribute to our understanding of the mental processes underlying mathematical thinking but also sheds light on how insight plays a role in one important type of real-life problem-solving.

Last modified

• 12/03/2023

Creator

• Xiao, Yao

Contributors

• Beeman, Mark (supervisor)
• Yu, Yuhua (supervisor)

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-k2k8-8981

Keyword

• Insight
• Problem-Solving
• Creativity
• Mathematical Thinking

Resource type

• Conference Proceeding

Rights statement

• No Known Copyright