A limited quantitative survey has been performed in order to study how attitudes, beliefs and feelings of students may influence the ability of solving text-based mathematical problems containing irrelevant information. The survey is also analyzing their capability of scrutinizing texts and sorting out relevant information.
The students took a written test with text-based problems of different amount of irrelevant information. The capability of understanding such problems was investigated versus degree of mathematical maturity and gender. Obtained results indicate a noticeable correlation between the occurrence of irrelevant information and the ability of solving the problems. Furthermore, attitudes, beliefs, and the degree of mathematical maturity, expressed in terms of age, have a clear influence on the results. On the other hand, this study has not revealed any significant difference between genders as regards the capability of solving text-based problems with irrelevant information.