Working memory, math anxiety and arithmetic skills in elementary education preservice teachers

Abstract

This study has been developed given the impact that will have the attitude towards mathematics and the arithmetic ability of the preservice teachers, with their future students learning math. For this, we explore the relationship between the Working Memory levels, math anxiety and arithmetic skills of 39 students from a private institution on the southeast of Mexico. To measure Working Memory in both domains, complex span task were used, for the math anxiety perception the Mathematical Anxiety Profile scale was applied and for the arithmetic ability, a set of verbal problems extracted from the public guides for the national admission high school exam of the National Center for Evaluation of Higher Education in Mexico. As in other studies, a positive association has been found between the Working Memory capacity and the arithmetic skills, and negative between the first and the level of math anxiety, in its scale of attitudes; which opens future possibilities to improve the first one and verify the impact in the last two.