Cognition in children’s mathematical processing: bringing psychology to the classroom

Abstract

Introduction. The cognitive processes that underpin successful mathematical processing in children have been well researched by experimental psychologists, but are not widely understood among teachers of primary mathematics. This is a shame, as an understanding of these cognitive processes could be highly useful to practitioners. This paper focuses on ‘working memory’, a cognitive system responsible for the concurrent storage and processing of information, which has been shown to be highly important in children’s mathematical processing.Method. This paper describes two experiments, both using a correlational design, undertaken with groups of 9 and 10 year old children. The first experiment compared performance on all elements of the Baddeley and Hitch working memory model with performance on simple addition and multiplication. The second experiment developed the first by taking a more detailed look at central executive functioning and comparing it with performance on addition and multiplication. Both experiments also looked at the children’s predominant calculation strategy to see if there was any evidence that working memory performance affects strategy development.Results. Results from the first experiment suggested that addition and multiplication make different cognitve demands on children, with multiplication drawing more heavily on phonological working memory and addition drawing more heavily on executive processes. The second experiment suggests that the involvement of executive processes in multiplication may be in inhibiting incorrect answers, whereas in addition they are linked to the ability to maintain and process information concurrently.Discussion and Conclusion: The results are discssed in terms of their usefulness for classroom practitioners.