Students’ use of assumptions to solve a modelling task with much or little personal interest in the real-world context of the task

International audience ; The real-world context of a modelling task is crucial to solve the task. Now students can be more or less interested in the real-world context of the task. In which way this (lack of) personal interest influences the solution process of the task is investigated in this project. Here the focus lies on the making and using of assumptions during the modelling process. To investigate this, a qualitative study was conducted. Ten seventh graders worked individually on two modelling tasks, one with much personal interest in the context (a) and one with little personal interest in the context (b). The comparison of each student’s solution process for the two tasks shows that there are differences between the cases (a) and (b), for example in the complexity of the modelling process.