The influence of college students’ mathematical literacy and information literacy on the ability to pose creative mathematical problems: based on the moderating-mediated effect of critical thinking tendency

The ability to pose creative mathematical problems rooted in real-world contexts — closely connected with mathematical modelling practice — is an important manifestation of creative thinking. In this study, 196 college students were surveyed to explore the effects of mathematical literacy, information literacy, and critical thinking tendency on the ability to pose creative mathematical problems. Different from pure intra-mathematical problem-posing tasks, our situational paradigm integrates real-life quantitative scenarios, which echoes the assessment orientation of mathematical literacy advocated by OECD.

The results show that: (1) The overall situation of college students’ ability to pose creative mathematical problems is relatively good, but there are significant differences in the high-and-medium-score rate of thinking fluency, flexibility, and originality; (2) The main effect of the category ‘major’ is significant, while the main effects of grade and gender are not obvious; (3) Mathematical literacy, information literacy, and critical thinking tendency have a significant positive impact on the ability to pose creative mathematical problems, and there are significant positive correlations between mathematical literacy and information literacy and critical thinking tendency; (4) Critical thinking tendency shows a significant moderated-mediation effect in the influence of mathematical literacy and information literacy on the ability to pose creative mathematical problems. This work is supported by the Collaborative Education Project of the Ministry of Education of China (220901444274013) and Sichuan Province Higher Education Talent Training Quality and Teaching Reform Project (JG2024-0442). Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China The authors declare no competing interests.

This study is a questionnaire-based empirical research involving human participants.The research project was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of Sichuan Agricultural University (Approval No. Jichujiaoxuebu Kelunshen [2026] No. 004). This ethical approval specifically covers this anonymous questionnaire survey targeting college-student participants.This research was performed in accordance with the relevant national laws of the People’s Republic of China, the institutional research ethics policies of Sichuan Agricultural University, and the ethical principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki.All participants took part in the investigation on a fully voluntary basis.

Electronic informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to questionnaire completion. The survey was designed as fully anonymous; no personally identifiable information such as name, student ID number, or ID card information was collected in the questionnaire. No minors were recruited in this study.

Participants could terminate their participation at any time without negative consequences. No physical or psychological harm was brought to research subjects. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.