Encontros Transculturais: Memória de trabalho, atenção e leitura em crianças brasileiras e moçambicanas

Abstract

Working memory (WM) and attention are complex cognitive tasks that work together for learning to read. As the relationship between these variables is well known, and because the countries and contexts are different, the study analyzed the relationship between MT, attention, reading and socioeconomic profile in Mozambican and Brazilian children. The study involved 201 children aged between 7 and 9 from the 2nd and 3rd year of elementary school in public schools. The instruments used were: Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices, a sociodemographic questionnaire to assess the health conditions of the children and the professional experience of the teachers, visual-spatial MT tests (TIMTraC) and auditory-digit subtests, the Psychological Battery for the Assessment of Attention - BPA, letter recognition test - own instrument (22 letters of the alphabet), word and pseudoword reading - LPI and fluency - Aflet. Analyses were made of normality, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Levene tests, descriptive analyses, Mann-Whitney (U) test, Chi-square (𝜒²) and Spearman's correlation coefficient (r). Brazilian children performed better in reading fluency, ability to recognize letters, visual MT and attention, while Mozambican children performed better in decoding words. The results for auditory MT were similar. Significant positive correlations were found in almost all the performance measurement variables (MT, attention and reading), from strong to weak in Brazil, while in Mozambique they were all weak, except for visual MT, which did not correlate with any variable.Only reading correlated with income in a weak positive way in Brazil and negatively in Mozambique.It was possible to observe that there are differences in the performance, relationship and associations between working memory, attention, reading and socioeconomic aspects between Brazilian and Mozambican children.It is important to point out that these relationships are well established in international literature, as well as in research with Brazilian and Portuguese children, but with African children these relationships were not found.Teaching methods and systems, the educational environment and other cultural factors, such as the Bantu languages in Mozambique, may be influencing the performance of these children's reading, MT and attention skills, as well as the relationship between reading skills and different types of attention, and MT.The fact that pencil-and-paper instruments were not used to assess visual working memory may have affected the results.The lack of standardized criteria for socioeconomic factors made data analysis difficult.The use of multiple instruments is recommended for future studies with the same design and similar populations.