Yes / Purpose To assess the impact of a six-week ‘Maths on the Move’ (MOTM) physically active learning programme on primary school children’s physical activity (PA) levels and maths performance. Method Randomised control trial. Year 5 children’s PA was assessed using accelerometry for five consecutive school days at baseline and during the final intervention week (final sample: n=97, age M=9.61±0.29, 52.6% female). Two maths performance tests were used; one assessing mathematical content taught during MOTM and one assessing math’s fluency (MASSAT). Both tests were conducted at baseline and following the intervention (week seven). Focus groups were conducted in week seven with intervention children (n=12), randomly choosing an even split of children classified with pre-intervention low or high PA levels. Results On average, during a typical 45-49 minutes MOTM lesson, children obtained an additional five minutes of moderate-to-vigorous PA and 5.7 minutes of light PA counteracted by a reduction of 9.5 minutes of time spent sedentary compared to children that remained in the classroom (control condition). The maths attainment test performance significantly improved over time for children in the MOTM compared to the control (+6.1 versus +0.9, p≤0.0001, d=1.507). No significant improvements were found in the MASSAT total score. Seven emerging themes were derived from the child focus groups. Children felt the MOTM sessions resulted in social and environmental improvements, which improved learning during the sessions. Children described the MOTM sessions as enjoyable, fun, engaging and invigorating – resulting in positive associations to learning and activity. Conclusion Collectively, the findings identify the MOTM programme improves pupil’s PA levels, academic outcomes and identifies pupil’s willingness, enjoyment, and engagement.

This thesis focuses on to word problems and elementary school pupils. Research on mathematical word problems suggests that differences in success are not only due to different levels of pupils' cognitive abilities but that their motivation plays a role, too. Therefore, in this study, I focused on the context of word problem as a potential source of situational interest, which may affect the quality of pupils' cognitive function in the short term or permanently. I used my participation in a broader quantitatively oriented research on variables influencing the difficulty of word problems and using its methodology, I investigated the influence of different types of contexts on pupils' success in solving the problems. The examined aspect of context was attractiveness - the question was whether pupils would be more successful in solving word problems with elements of fairy tale, science fiction or humour than in similar problems with the same structure but with a neutral context. Pupils of the 3rd to 6th grades of primary school (n = 2 092) were divided into two groups of a comparable ability and each was presented with one of the variants - attractive or neutral. To evaluate the results quantitatively, the Item Response Theory was used allowed us to determine the difficulty of the problem depending on...