The relationship between visuospatial sketchpad capacity and children's mathematical skills

By Joni Holmes, John Adams, Colin Hamilton. 2008

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined the association between visuospatial sketchpad (VSSP) capacity and children's mathematics attainment. The aim of the study was to explore age-related differences in the relationship between the visual and spatial memory subcomponents of the VSSP (Logie, 1995) and a range of mathematical skills. Fifty-one 7- to 8-year-old and fifty-six 9- to 10-year-old primary schoolchildren participated in the study. The Visual Patterns Test and the Block Recall task were employed as VSSP measures. The results revealed a differential pattern of associations between children's visual and spatial working memory abilities and their mathematical skills. In younger children, the Block Recall task predicted mathematics performance, whereas, in the older children, the Visual Patterns Test was a significant predictor of mathematics performance.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9f1412c4c9f0191542deb9638b325236cb2386d

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

The differential role of verbal and visuospatial working memory in mathematics and reading (2018, unknown): “…that verbal WM is related to reading (Swanson, Xinhua Zheng, & Jerman, 2009), and visuospatial WM is related to math skills (Caviola et al., 2014; Holmes, Adams, & Hamilton, 2008), whereas other research suggested the same WM resources can be attributed to both reading and mathematics (e.g.,…”
Working memory and mathematics: A review of developmental, individual difference, and cognitive approaches. (2010, background): “…older children, the central executive predicted performance on both the easy and the hard items, but the phonological loop task predicted performance on the easy items, and the visual–spatial sketchpad task predicted performance on the difficult items (also see Holmes, Adams, and Hamilton, 2008).”
Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment (2016, background): “The filter removes a small number of SNPs in ten of the remaining 20 cohorts: LBC1936 (9 SNPs dropped), INGI-CARL (64), THISEAS (225), H2000 Controls (16), Hypergenes (1), H2000 Cases (2), MoBa (566), OGP (2300), COPSAC2000 (8561).”
Spatial and visual working memory ability in children with difficulties in arithmetic word problem solving (2010, background): “In particular, the data indicated a stronger role for VSWM (eg, maze memory) in the performance of younger children on mathematics (see also Holmes, Adams, & Hamilton, 2008 ).”
Pathways to mathematics: longitudinal predictors of performance. (2010, background): “…memory in mathematical development has indicated that the spatial span task (also known as Corsi or block span) is a useful index of visualspatial working memory in young children (Bull et al., 2008; Holmes et al., 2008; McKenzie et al., 2003; Rasmussen & Bisanz, 2005; Simmons et al., 2008).”