Abstract
Previous studies have found that the development of mathematical abilities, along with the development of executive functions, predict students’ subsequent academic performance. The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness of teaching the concept of area to preschool children with different levels of cognitive processes (CP) including executive functions and short-term memory. The experiment introduced the concept by using three different instructional approaches: traditional, contextual, and modeling. The sample included 100 children aged 6–7 years (M = 6.5 years), of whom 43% were boys. Each experimental condition included children with low, middle, and high levels of CP, as determined based on the NEPSY-II subtests. The children with low CP levels showed higher results in assimilating the notion of area after being taught using the contextual approach. In contrast, children with high CP levels showed a higher mastery of the concept of area following the use of the modeling approach. The results suggest the importance of CP development in building ways of mastering mathematical content. This contributes to choosing the optimal path of teaching mathematics for preschoolers, taking into account the development of their cognitive processes to improve their academic performance.
Highlights
In order to compare the effectiveness of different instructional approaches for teaching mathematical skills to children with different levels of cognitive processes, it is necessary to choose mathematical content that is completely unknown to children
The groups we identified by cognitive processes (CP) level were characterized by the most significant differences in inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and visual short-term memory, which as this study suggests, are the most closely related to the students’ mathematical abilities [15,16,17,22]
Based on the results of the two subsequent tests, this difference remained throughout the experiment, which confirms the existence of a connection between the CPs and the development level of the students’
Summary
The growth of executive functions is a key aspect of child development prior to school entry, which has been shown to predict preschoolers’ future academic success [1,2,3,4,5]. Diamond, who understood executive functions as a group of cognitive processes that provide targeted problem solving and adaptive behavior in new situations [7] They help to monitor, control thought, and activities by shifting the processes toward the task-related stimulus despite the presence of secondary tasks and interference [6,7]. Sci. 2020, 10, 181 focusing and/or attention switching under conditions of changing targets), and (3) inhibitory control (an ability to inhibit a dominant response) [6,7,8,9,10,11] These components are related to each other, but can be considered as being independent of each other, which is why this model came to be called ‘unity and diversity’. The situation where children are required to retain information in a nontransformed form may be related to individual differences in the ability to maintain information in an active, quickly retrievable state that subordinates controlling attention [15]
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