A Study On The Relationship Between Mathematical Performance And Attention Of Lower Grade Primary School Students

Mathematics,having a wide range of content fields,is a science that studies quantitative relations and spatial forms.Mathematics learning is a complex task.There are many factors affecting students' math learning performance,which are closely related to various core abilities in the cognitive field.Attention,as one of the most vital processes in human cognition,plays an important role in students' math learning.A large number of studies have confirmed the correlation between attention and mathematics achievement.But the mathematics achievement in those studies were generally measured.This study attempts to explore the relationship between mathematical performance and attention of lower grade students in primary school from the content dimension and cognitive dimension.The content dimension,referred to the curriculum standards of compulsory education,includes number and algebra,figure and geometry,statistics and probability.And the cognitive dimension includes four ability levels: knowing facts,applying rules,mathematical reasoning,and unconventional problem-solving.This study takes the second and third grade students from two primary schools in Shanghai as the research object,and uses a mathematics achievement test which contains three mathematical contents and four cognitive levels for students to measure the mathematical performance.At the same time,with the method of computer aided test,using multiple-object tracking task measure students' attention.The difference and correlation analysis of the data were carried out to explore the following questions:(1)What is the relationship between the performance of lower grade primary school students on different math contents and their attention level?(2)What is the relationship between the performance of lower grade primary school students on different mathematical cognitive level problems and their attention level?The results prove that:(1)There are significant differences in the performance of lower grade primary school students with different attention levels on number and algebra,figure and geometry content.And the performance of attention is significantly positive correlated with students' performance of the above two contents.(2)At the cognitive level of applying rules,there are significant differences in the performance of lower grade primary school students with different attention levels in solving mathematical problem.And the performance of attention is significantly positively correlated with the performance of students in solving the mathematical problem of knowing facts,applying rules,mathematical reasoning,and unconventional problem-solving cognitive level.Based on the above conclusions,this paper offers some advice for teachers and parents.