Аннотация:A version of FEM is constructed with piecewise-linear basic function which makes it possible to find, on a sequence of meshes adaptive to the solution, an approximate solution of the first boundary value problem for second-order linear ordinary differential equation with a required accuracy. New strategy of mesh refinement and coarsening are proposed based on the estimates of variation in norm C of the approximate solution upon an addition of a trial node to the interval of the grid and trial removal of a node from a current grid. Numerical experiments are carried out on the estimation of the efficiency of the method using problems whose solutions have a singularity of the type of a boundary layer.