Students' perception of difficulty of algebraic tasks in elementary school

The thesis is about students’ perception of difficulty of algebraic equations in elementary school. The theoretical part of the thesis describes the process of metacognition and the function of the perception of difficulty of mathematics tasks in the learning process. Then, we present the semantic and syntactic components of mathematics tasks (an analogy to semantic and syntactic components of plain texts). In particular, we consider these components on tasks related to the solution of linear equations. The components serve as a tool for analyzing the difficulty of mathematics tasks. We consider also the results of TIMSS and NPZ studies related to the linear algebraic equations with one unknown and relate them to the components that influence their difficulty and are later used in the empirical part of the thesis. In the empirical part of the thesis we present a research on the factors that influence the students’ perception of the difficulty of algebraic equations. Students were asked to range the tasks within several triads of tasks according to the perceived difficulty of the tasks. The found perceived difficulty of the tasks is compared with students’ performance in the TIMSS and NPZ research and the published research by other authors