Relating Students' Perceptions of Interest and Difficulty to the Richness of Mathematical Problems Posted on the CAMI Website

Abstract

 The CAMI website is a virtual community designed for francophone students from K-12 school levels in New Brunswick, Canada, and elsewhere in the world. The main purpose of this learning environment is to increase its members’ opportunities to learn mathematics by proposing rich, interesting, and challenging problems. Although few studies have been conducted on CAMI website, none explored if richness of the problems is related to how interesting and difficult the members perceived the problems to be. The present article addresses this lack by investigating the possibility of links between members’ perceptions of interest and difficulty of the mathematical problems posted, and the richness of the problems according to the creators of CAMI. Using a sequential mixed method design (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) and Manuel’s (2010) model, we studied first the richness of 118 problems for which online surveys were conducted that questioned students about how interesting and difficult they found the problems to be. Then we studied how the richness is related to students’ perceptions. Although the results showed no significant relation between the richness of the problems according to the researchers and the students’ perception of interest and difficulty, some tendencies, however, prompt the need for further analysis.