Abstract
The complex interplay between cognitive and emotional factors at the base of maths achievement started to be evaluated and quantified in the last few years. Only a few studies, anyway, examine at the same time, the role of working memory (visuospatial and verbal subsystem) and maths anxiety together with self-competence, on maths attainment. To investigate the specific link between these three factors, in a large developmental sample, we enrol 335 students from the 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades. In respect to emotional and motivational factors, data indicates a direct influence of maths anxiety on maths performance. Furthermore, the results highlight that maths anxiety differently impacts working memory subsystems. In fact, we observe a significant and indirect effect of MA, through the visuospatial system, on maths achievement. Our results provide further support to the hypothesis that maths anxiety is a special type of anxiety, most likely impacting the visuospatial rather than the verbal working memory subsystem. Data is discussed in terms of a possible mechanism underlying maths anxiety and visuospatial working memory at the base of this specificity, and in relation to the role of self-competence in this interplay.
Highlights
Mathematic ability is one of the most crucial skills that a person needs to master in life for its well-established role at a personal level referring to salary size (Dougherty, 2003), socioeconomic status (SES) (Gerardi et al, 2013; Gross et al, 2009), properly mastering everyday activities, and personal wellbeing (Reyna et al, 2009)
In the present study we examined the role of working memory and MA together with self-competence, on arithmetic reasoning, and we tried to reach the following aims: 1. jointly evaluate the correlation between emotional, motivational, and cognitive factors - too often investigated separately- and arithmetic reasoning in the students of the 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades and, among the others, to observe the possible relationship between working memory and selfcompetence, 2. to investigate the mediating role of WM and self-competence to better understand the relationship between MA and arithmetic reasoning
Arithmetic reasoning was inserted as a dependent variable and the independent variables are in the first block measures VWM (Digit span), in the second block measure VSWM (Dot Memory), in the third block measure
Summary
Mathematic ability is one of the most crucial skills that a person needs to master in life for its well-established role at a personal level referring to salary size (Dougherty, 2003), socioeconomic status (SES) (Gerardi et al, 2013; Gross et al, 2009), properly mastering everyday activities, and personal wellbeing (Reyna et al, 2009). We consider crucial to observe the possible relationship between working memory (verbal and visuospatial components) and self-competence, scarcely evaluated in other contributions; 2) to investigate the mediating role of working memory and self-competence to better understand the relationship between maths anxiety and arithmetic reasoning. Important fact is that limited number of studies investigated mediating role of WM and self-competence on the relationship between math anxiety and mathematics in school age children as a unique model (Justicia-Galiano et al, 2017). A crucial factor is represented by working memory (WM) (De Smedt et al, 2009) This factor has a well-established effect on a variety of maths domains such as mental addition and subtraction (Mammarella et al, 2013), and problem-solving (Passolunghi et al, 2019). The episodic buffer is rarely studied in young children and even if researchers have proposed alternative models to explain WM functioning, such as a domain-general (Kane et al, 2004) or a domain-specific (Shah & Miyake, 1996), studies in developmental psychology indicate that the tripartite model can better explain the WM functioning (Giofrè et al, 2017)
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