The Influence of the Attractiveness of Context of a Mathematical Word Problem on Performance and Solving Processes

This thesis focuses on to word problems and elementary school pupils. Research on mathematical word problems suggests that differences in success are not only due to different levels of pupils' cognitive abilities but that their motivation plays a role, too. Therefore, in this study, I focused on the context of word problem as a potential source of situational interest, which may affect the quality of pupils' cognitive function in the short term or permanently. I used my participation in a broader quantitatively oriented research on variables influencing the difficulty of word problems and using its methodology, I investigated the influence of different types of contexts on pupils' success in solving the problems. The examined aspect of context was attractiveness - the question was whether pupils would be more successful in solving word problems with elements of fairy tale, science fiction or humour than in similar problems with the same structure but with a neutral context. Pupils of the 3rd to 6th grades of primary school (n = 2 092) were divided into two groups of a comparable ability and each was presented with one of the variants - attractive or neutral. To evaluate the results quantitatively, the Item Response Theory was used allowed us to determine the difficulty of the problem depending on..