Аннотация: The article presents a study aimed at studying the features of the distribution of types of analysis (content and formal) in solving problems by students of the third (28 people) and fourth (27 people) classes. Individual experiments were carried out on the material of spatial-combinatorial problems of the author's technique "Letters as numbers". It was found that a meaningful analysis compared to a formal one is performed in the third grade by slightly more children, respectively: 53.6% and 46.4%, and in the fourth grade - significantly more children, respectively: 62.9% and 37.1% .