Conservation Abilities, Visuospatial Skills, and Numerosity Processing Speed: Association With Math Achievement and Math Difficulties in Elementary School Children.

ACADEMIC achievement; ANALYSIS of covariance; CHI-squared test; STATISTICAL correlation; ELEMENTARY schools; INTELLECT; INTELLIGENCE tests; LITERACY; MATHEMATICS; METROPOLITAN areas; MULTIVARIATE analysis; PROBABILITY theory; REGRESSION analysis; RESEARCH evaluation; RESEARCH funding; RURAL conditions; SCHOOL children; STATISTICS; THOUGHT & thinking; VISUAL perception in children; DATA analysis; SOCIOECONOMIC factors; TASK performance; DATA analysis software; DESCRIPTIVE statistics

The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between elementary school children’s mathematical achievement and their conservation abilities, visuospatial skills, and numerosity processing speed. We also assessed differences in these abilities between children with different types of learning problems. In Study 1 (N = 229), we investigated second to fourth graders and in Study 2 (N = 120), third and fourth graders. Analyses revealed significant contributions of numerosity processing speed and visuospatial skills to math achievement beyond IQ. Conservation abilities were predictive in Study 1 only. Children with math difficulties showed lower visuospatial skills and conservation abilities than children with typical achievement levels and children with reading and/or spelling difficulties, whereas children with combined difficulties explicitly showed low conservation abilities. These findings provide further evidence for the relations between children’s math skills and their visuospatial skills, conservation abilities, and processing speed and contribute to the understanding of deficits that are specific to mathematical difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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