Evaluation of Students' Responses
It would be worthwhile to mention here how to evaluate student's activity in the open-approach method. This is because the aim of the method is not to produce ,correct answers but to promote student's mathematical ways of thinking and creativity. Indeed, it is not easy for the teacher to evaluate a variety of student's responses being produced.Student's response is evaluated according to the following criteria (see Shimada, 1977)
Fluency how many solutions can each student produce? Flexibility how many different mathematical ideas can each student discover ? Originality to what degree is student's idea original?Elegance to what degree is student's expression of his or her idea simple and clear? These criteria need to be evaluated by both quantitatively and qualitatively. Here, especially the first two criteria can be evaluated by counting the number of responses.