mathematics, education, secondary school

In this presentation we are going to present results of the observation aimed at a choice preference of mathematical tasks and the success rate of solving them within a competition for students of secondary schools. We organized a competition for secondary school students of different types. 150 students aged 16 ? 18 took part in this competition. Students were choosing tasks out of 40 mathematical problems in 8 topics. Half of the problems were standard school tasks, second half was represented by brain teasers, logical problems etc., we named them nonstandard. In this presentation we are going to present answers to following questions: What kind of mathematical tasks did the students prefer? Were there differences in the success rate of solving tasks within particular topics? We expected that students would prefer and would succeed particularly in standard tasks where they know procedures for solving and in problems that they would find easy. We found out that students more preferred nonstandard tasks, they were selecting the geometric problems most. Rate of successfully solved nonstandard tasks exceeded the rate of the successfully solved standard tasks only in the group of word problems and algebraic problems. However, with the geometric problems you could notice the opposite trend. Results were processed using descriptive statistics and analysis of variance.