Relationships between facets of working memory and performance on a curriculum-based mathematics test in children

By Murray Maybery, N. Do. Educational & Child Psychology, 2003

59 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The involvement of different components of working memory in children’s mathematical reasoning was investigated by administering four memory span tasks and a curriculum-based test of mathematics to 9- to 10-year-old children. The mathematics test contained number, space and measurement sections, and the span tasks differed as to whether sequences comprised auditory-verbal or visual-spatial items and whether recall involved the entire sequence (fixed span), or a subset of items from the end of a supraspan sequence (running span). The running span tasks were expected to require updating, and therefore involve executive mechanisms in addition to systems specialised for retaining verbal and spatial information. Surprisingly, the two fixed span variables accounted for more variance than the two running span variables in mathematics test scores. Also, fixed spatial span generally accounted for more variance in mathematics performance than did fixed verbal span, although the latter did make significant unique contributions in predicting scores from two sections of the mathematics test. These outcomes were unchanged when a measure of single word reading was used as a control variable. Discussion centres on the involvement of spatial and verbal short-term memory in different forms of mathematical reasoning. It is argued that running memory tasks may invoke various executive processes depending on their precise structure, and some of these processes may not be critical to mathematical reasoning.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d9af828f97ff5064683cb139f078049100ace63

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

Working Memory and Children’s Mathematical Skills: Implications for mathematical development and mathematics curricula (2006, background): “Contrary to Maybery and Do (2003), this implies that different mathematical skills do not recruit different WM resources.”
Visuospatial working memory in intuitive geometry, and in academic achievement in geometry (2013, unknown): “…in children's ability to count (Kyttälä, Aunio, Lehto, van Luit, & Hautamaki, 2003), performance in multi-digit operations (Heathcote, 1994) and nonverbal problem-solving (Rasmussen & Bisanz, 2005), and mathematical achievement (Bull et al., 2008; Jarvis & Gathercole, 2003; Maybery & Do, 2003).”
Individual differences in arithmetic (2012, background): “’ (Intellectual Arithmetic, by A Teacher of Youth, McIntosh, 1977, in A.Floyd (Ed.) (1981), Developing mathematical thinking, Wokingham: Open University Press, pp.”
The relationship between visuospatial sketchpad capacity and children's mathematical skills (2008, background): “Those that have measured different mathematical skills typically included a single measure of VSSP functioning (e.g., Maybery & Do, 2003).”
Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting, updating, inhibition, and working memory (2006, background): “…a number of skills such as counting and mental arithmetic, measurement abilities (e.g., perimeter, area, and time), and space abilities (manipulation or evaluation of geometric forms), all of which may require working memory resources (e.g., Geary, 2004; Maybery & Do, 2003; Swanson, 2004).”