The Relationship Between Executive Function And Exact And Approximate Arithmetic Of Primary Students And Adults

Arithmetic plays an important role in life and education.Executive function and arithmetic have a close relationship,and this relationship could be affected by difficulty of arithmetic.Exact arithmetic and approximate arithmetic both are arithmetic,but they have different process.Arithmetic and executive function develop differently at different stages.In order to study the development of the relationship between executive function subcomponents and arithmetic(exact and approximate arithmetic)of different levels of difficulty,this study recruited college students and 3th and 4th primary school students to complete exact and approximate arithmetic which are with carrying or not.The study also tested the inhibition,shift,and updating ability(verbal updating and visual-spatial updating)of the participants.This study used structural equation model and hierarchical regression for data analysis.The results show that,firstly,executive function subcomponents’ prediction on exact and approximate arithmetic has similarities and differences in different periods.Adults’ approximate arithmetic is more dependent on inhibition,shift and verbal updating ability than exact arithmetic,while exact arithmetic is more dependent on visual-spatial updating than approximate arithmetic.Differently,children’ s exact and approximate arithmetic only have relationship with verbal updating ability.Secondly,difficulty doesn’ t affect the predictive effect of updating ability and exact arithmetic.Verbal and visual-spatial updating’ s prediction on exact arithmetic is not affected by difficulty.Children’ s verbal updating ability predicts simple and difficult exact arithmetic similarly.Thirdly,difficulty affects the predictive effect of updating ability and approximate arithmetic.For adults,verbal updating ability has a stronger predictive effect on simple approximate arithmetic than difficult ones.Otherwise,there is no significant difference between verbal updating ability’ s prediction on children’ s simple and difficult approximate arithmetic.In summary,executive function subcomponents’ prediction on exact and approximate arithmetic with different difficulty has similarities and differences in different periods.