Chapter 14 - The Role of Executive Function Skills in the Development of Children’s Mathematical Competencies

Abstract

Efforts to understand the domain-general skills that are involved in children's mathematics performance have identified that executive functions, the set of skills that control our thoughts and behavior, play an important role. Previous research has demonstrated that working memory, inhibition, and shifting are all related to overall mathematics achievement. More recently, researchers have begun to explore the mechanisms by which executive function skills play a role in mathematics in more detail, by examining the relationship between executive function skills and different components of mathematics, including factual knowledge, procedural skill, and conceptual understanding. In this chapter, we review the evidence for the role of executive function skills in multiple components of mathematics. We also consider new studies that investigate the precise relationships between executive function skills and arithmetic components across a wide age range.