Do número às contas: relação entre funções executivas e aritmética

Abstract

The Arithmetic is present in the people’s daily lives, occupying an ever larger space in the actions experienced by society. The Arithmetic consists of a branch of mathematics that treats with some operations on numerals, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (RAAD, 2005). Some researches show the importance of executive functions (EF's) for arithmetic learning. The present study had as general objective to identify the existence of the relationship between the performance in EF's and the performance in arithmetic. More specifically, we want to measure the performance in executive functions and also in arithmetic, to compare the performance of EF's by grade, age and genre, as well as to verify which is the component of the executive functions that is more related to performance in arithmetic. A total of 108 children participated in this study, 52 females (48.1%) and 56 males (51.9%) in the grade 4 or grade 5, ranging from 8 to 12 years old (M = 9.62; SD = 0.904). The instruments used to evaluate Arithmetic and EF's were: the arithmetic test, the A and B trails test, Attention by Cancellation (AbC) and Digit Span. The data were analyzed by quantitatively, used the SPSS’ help, where the following analyzes were performed: Mann- Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, ANOVA and Pearson's correlation. It was find positive and significant correlations between EF performance and arithmetic, as well as significant differences between grade’s groups and ages.