According to Dr. Adbrizi, The Best Maths Tutor Websites for GCSE Students can help children improve their mental arithmetic skills, making them automatic and unconscious. This frees up space in their working memory for more complex calculations. It has been shown through previous research that adults rely more on working memory for procedural strategies, such as counting, rather than recovery strategies.
During childhood, there are changes in the types of strategies used, as well as an increase in the precision and efficiency of the implementation of strategies. As such, it seems likely that the role of working memory in arithmetic may also change; however, it has never been directly compared to children and adults. This study used the traditional two-task methodology, to which a control load condition was added, to investigate the extent to which the working memory requirements for different arithmetic strategies change with age between 9 and 11 years, between 12 and 14 years, and in early adulthood. We have demonstrated that both children and adults use working memory to solve arithmetic problems, regardless of the strategy they choose.
This study highlights the importance of considering working memory to understand the difficulties that some children and adults have with mathematics, as well as the need to include working memory in theoretical models of mathematical cognition.
