Page 93 - Children’s mathematical development and learning needs in perspective of teachers’ use of dynamic math interviews

Role of executive functioning in mathematical development
‘green’. This task is based on the Stroop (1935) procedure. In the shifting + inhibition condition (condition 4), the child is presented with a page containing the words red, green, and blue written in red, green, or blue ink. Half of the words are presented in boxes. The respondent is asked to state the color of the ink in which the word is printed (just as in the inhibition condition) or, when the word appears within a box, instead to read the word aloud (and not name the ink color). The child has to switch between reading the word and naming the color of the ink. This must be done as quickly and accurately as possible. Each condition has two practice rows, with a total of 10 items. The 50 items were presented in five rows of 10 items each. The child has to complete each condition in a maximum of 180 seconds. When the child completed each condition in less than 180 seconds, the completion time for each condition is noted in seconds. Raw scores were used as measures for inhibition and shifting + inhibition, consisting of completion time and correct words named for each of the two conditions. For both the inhibition and shifting + inhibition conditions, faster completion times and fewer errors indicate better performance; the lower the score, the better. In the present study, the reliability for the CWIT (all four conditions) was found to be generally acceptable (.76), but questionable to acceptable for both the inhibition (.62) and shifting + inhibition (.68) conditions.
Data analyses
The data and descriptive statistics for all of the measures were first screened for potential errors and outliers. We discovered five outliers when checking for normality. We used boxplots as well as z-scores with a standard cut-off value of +/- 3.00 from 0. Outliers were then removed from the data (one non-verbal reasoning score, one inhibition, three shifting + inhibition). All of the variables were normally distributed with acceptable values of skewness and kurtosis (Field, 2009). We next computed the Pearson correlations between the predictor and outcome measures.
To address the first research question, a multiple hierarchical regression analysis was conducted with mathematical problem-solving at the end of grade 4 as the outcome variable. Arithmetic fluency and the measures of executive functioning were the independent variables.
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