Abstract:

Interdisciplinarity became a frequently discussed topic for many reasons in recent years. Connection of the real world and theoretical knowledge spreads across the schooling systems and undoubtedly brings a lot of advantages we do not have to highlight. Unfortunately, it also brings disadvantages, which we want to pay attention to in our work. This article introduces one of those disadvantages in details. It discusses the issue of word problems in mathematics, their formulation within interdisciplinarity and its influence on pupils’ ability to mathematize a real situation and solve the given problems successfully.

Formulation of word problems in mathematics, which describe a real situation, gets much longer. This is primarily due to the need to precisely describe the situation and provide all relevant data. A longer text enables to formulate more questions. Extensive word problems of this type have become very popular in secondary school entrance exams in recent years. They cause considerable problems mainly to pupils of lower grades of elementary schools, who are unsuccessful in these entrance exams.

Therefore we decided to analyse a sample of 20 pupils, the success and time demands of solving the above mentioned tasks in comparison with a larger number of word problems, which are short, ask only one question, but are identical in content. We have chosen the eye-tracking method for this purpose. It allows us to follow how pupils read the problems and how they orient in different types of assignments. Considering the number of respondents and form we used, we talk about qualitative research and its results were handled adequately.

It has been confirmed that eye-tracking is currently a very important didactic tool that can show a teacher how his/her pupils read and mine information, which should be reflected in the formulation of exam problems.

Keywords:

Mathematics, word problems, interdisciplinarity, Eye Tracking, entrance exam.