The aim of the study was to investigate the difference of math achivement on reading comprehension, higher-order thinking skills and working memory. Previous studies have reported that reading strategy of learning served to enhance math performance an...
The aim of the study was to investigate the difference of math achivement on reading comprehension, higher-order thinking skills and working memory. Previous studies have reported that reading strategy of learning served to enhance math performance and that higher-order thinking and capacity of working memory had an effect on reading capability.
Research questions of this study can be summarized as follows:
First, how does reading comprehension have an effect on math achivement?
Second, how does higher-order thinking have an effect on math achivement?
Third, how does working memory have an effect on math achivement?
To that end, this study was conducted on students at the age of 11 with logical and inductive thinking who were instructed to solve math questions of 2nd semester of the 5th grade, in order to investigate relationship between reading capability, higher-order thinking, and working memory. The sample of this study was composed of 126 students in the 5th grade of H primary school located in G city, and the questions were generated based on math textbook and workbook to measure students’ performance. The analysis of the scores in the basic performance test conducted earlier in the semester as a covariate for the purpose of the effect of practice indicates the following results.
First, math achivement of the group with higher reading comprehension was found higher than that of the group with lower reading comprehension, which means that math achivement can be increased by enhancing reading comprehension to read questions and apply to other questions, rather than simple calculating ability. This result leads to the conclusion that systematic reading strategy for primary school students in the various stages of development can act to elevate their math achivement.
Second, the analysis on whether there is any significant difference in math achivement depending on the level of higher-order thinking showed that there was no significant difference between groups. This result implies that questions on the test provided by researchers were not capable to allow students to exert their higher-order thinking capability.
Third, in relation with math achivement by working memory capacity, the group with higher working memory capacity of central executive was found to have higher math performance than their counterparts.
This study indicated that working memory of central executive functioning as an attention controller to select or reject information and plan and monitor all the stages of cognitive information processing served as an important variable to explain student’s achivement to solve a given task. In particular, the fact that working memory of central executive had the strongest effect during a problem-solving task of learning supports the model of Baddeley (1986) that working memory of central executive is responsible for planning and monitoring of cognitive process.