Influence of the Type of Mathematical Problems on Students’ and Pre-service Teachers’ Interest and Performance. A Replication and Elaboration Study

Abstract Several studies confirm the importance of the role of students’ interest in learning mathematics. This article describes the process of conceptual replication of Rellensmann and Schukajlow’s (2017) research on how the connection to the reality of a mathematical problem affects the interest in solving it. Our study distinguishes between intramathematical problems, word problems and modelling problems. It was implemented with 80 Spanish ninth-grade students and 80 pre-service teachers. The results show that Spanish students are more interested in intramathematical problems and less interested in modelling problems, while pre-service teachers are more interested in problems connected to reality, especially word problems. We also provide data regarding the performance of students and prospective teachers, which is higher in word problems. In addition, we find that there are significant relationships between performance and task-specific interest. These results complement the original study, as they allow us to contrast whether there are differences with German students and to explain the German pre-service teachers’ judgements of students’ interest in problems with and without a connection to reality. The impact sheet to this article can be accessed at 10.6084/m9.figshare.25507636 .