FACTORS AFFECTING STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF DIFFICULTY IN CALCULUS WORD PROBLEMS Tracy CRAIG University of Cape Town Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa email: tracy@maths.uct.ac.za ABSTRACT The purpose of the research project detailed in this paper was to ascertain, if possible, the answers to the research question that can be broken down into the following subquestions: 1) What factors contribute to students’ perception of the difficulty level of a word problem? 2) How do students rank word problems in order of difficulty? 3) Are there differences between experts and novices in the ranking of problems? The data collection instrument was designed in such a way that relative effects on difficulty level between characteristics could be determined, although no absolute effects, such as a quantitative measure of difficulty on an independent scale. For instance, it appeared that the context of the problem (concrete or abstract) had a greater effect on perceived difficulty level than the presence of a diagram. It was not possible to see, however, whether the difference was a subtle one or a clear and consequential one. The results of this study are informative, and it is the aim of this paper to summarise the central ideas on which the study was based, to outline briefly how the data was collected and to draw conclusions on the analysed data. KEY WORDS/TERMS : mathematics education, word problems, hierarchy of difficulty, modal vectors