摘要：This study was conducted with the aim to examine the effect of context on perceived cognitive load and students’ achievements in problem-solving tasks. It included 161 eighth-grade students. The tasks in the test, which was used as a measuring instrument for assessing knowledge, were designed at three levels of complexity: without context, with moderate and with rich context. Each task was followed by a 7-point Likert-type scale, as a measure of perceived cognitive load. The analysis of obtained results showed that the highest average achievement was reached in the group of tasks without context, followed by the group of tasks with moderate context, while the group of context-rich tasks was characterized by the lowest achievement. Furthermore, the results have shown that there is a statistically significant difference between achievement in tasks without context and tasks with moderate context, as well as between achievement in tasks without context and context-rich tasks, while there was no statistically significant difference between achievement in tasks with moderate and context-rich tasks. Similar results were obtained for the perceived cognitive load, thus indicating that context-rich tasks abound in information and therefore impose high cognitive demands on learners. These findings may represent a significant contribution to the still under-researched area of context-based assessment thus paving way for further research in this area, such as investigating the influence of prior knowledge or motivation on solving context-rich tasks.
关键词：context-rich tasks; perceived cognitive load; tasks with moderate context; tasks without context.
