Creative behaviours in mathematics: Relationships with abilities, demographics, affects and gifted behaviours

•Five key creative behaviours are identified based on mathematician creativity.•Component association and outcome improvement relate to mathematics abilities.•Few creative behaviours relate to demographics.•Most creative behaviours moderately relate to affects and gifted behaviours.

This study aims to identify key creative behaviours in mathematics and to investigate the relationships of the identified behaviours with mathematics achievements, demographics, mathematics affects, and general gifted behaviours. The research participants were 372 Grade 4 students. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identify 5 key creative behaviours in mathematics: representation invention, component association, outcome improvement, alternative curiosity, and space imagination. The results of correlation analyses reveal that component association and outcome improvement relate to mathematics achievements, reasoning, and creativity. The 5 creative behaviours have few relationships with gender, gifted education experiences, and parent education, but many relationships with mathematics affects and general gifted behaviours. The identified key creative behaviours can be used to design effective pedagogies for promoting student creativity in mathematics.