Modelling in environments without numbers

In order to study how students are handling modelling situations, we address the type of tasks without an obvious mathematical character. The mathematical elements are somehow hidden and are to be elaborated by the students, if their solving strategy goes in that direction. The main reason why we elected such a kind of task is that we wanted to prevent students from concentrating on calculations, but to challenge them getting involved in argumentation processes. In mathematics classrooms students can face such situations, when the task they are given to work on does apparently not fit into any of the subfields they know or that were previously dealt with. Therefore they are not able to decide which method could be appropriate for finding a solution. Moreover, it is not often the case that students are asked to work on mathematical tasks where there is nothing to be calculated. Also for this reason, it is even questionable whether this kind of tasks belongs to mathematics. „How do the students tackle these problems?“ and „to which extent do they use mathematics?“ are challenging questions which indubitably deserve attention and study. The overall goal of our study is to reconceptualise the term 'mathematising' in the context of classroom tasks, by empirical means, looking at what students see as being mathematics.