The thesis offers a detailed overview of contextual word problems and their role in the mathematics teaching. It presents different classifications of the context within the mathematical task. The emphasis is on the role and impact that a specific type of context has to the students acquisition of mathematical knowledge. The following part analyses Croatian curricular documents and three mathematics textbook sets for the third grade of primary school in terms of contextual word problems. The purpose of the analysis of mathematic textbook sets is to represent the situation of word problems, i.e. contextual word problems in Croatian teaching practice. Apart from the quantity of contextual word problems, the analysis also considered word problems depending on the context type, i.e. with the consideration of the following criteria: the degree of reality of the situation, the distance of the context from students and the visual representation of the contextual situation. The results of the analysis showed that students are not faced with the sufficient amount of word problems, nor contextual word problems. The majority of word problems in mathematics textbook sets are word problems with a realistic context which do not motivate students nor stimulate their solving. The distance of the context from students is not significant for solving the task if it considers the meaning of the situation associated with reality. Contextual word problems lack of visual representation of the contextual situation which could help students in understanding and solving problems. Finally, the analysis of the textbooks revealed that Croatian mathematics teaching practice is lacking in contextual word problems. The thesis accordingly proposes the examples of the adequate contextual word problems.