Thought structures as an instrument to determine the degree of difficulty of modelling tasks

International audienceAlthough efforts have been made to integrate the concept of mathematical modelling in school, studies show that it has not arrived yet in everyday school classes. From a teacher's point of view, multiple solution approaches and a varying task difficulty complicate especially the development and assessment of modelling tasks. Taking up this issue, this study aims at developing a method to determine the degree of difficulty of solution approaches of modelling tasks based on so called thought structures of student solutions. Thought structures of student solutions provide information about the task difficulty and can be taken as a basis for a well-founded rating scheme. We want to consider the question of whether the method used to describe the degree of difficulty can be reproduced by empirical results