ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the existence and strength of relationships between students’ cognitive skills and... Show moreABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the existence and strength of relationships between students’ cognitive skills and mathematical problem-solving performance. Specifically, relationships between students’ verbal, spatial, and analytical skills and their problem-solving performance on items that require a verbal response, items that require a spatial response, and overall problem-solving performance were investigated. A review of the literature also revealed assumptions of close links between verbal and logical/analytical skills, resulting in a lack of assessment of these skills as separate constructs. This study therefore sought to measure each of the cognitive skills separately in order to clearly establish the existence and strength of any pair-wise relationships among the cognitive skills. Ninety-eight students from the fifth- through eighth-grades were administered assessments of verbal skills, spatial skills, and logical/analytical skills, as well as a problem-solving instrument that consisted of a verbal (PST-Verbal) subtest and a spatial (PST-Spatial) subtest. The results indicated statistically significant relationships between students’ cognitive skills and problemsolving performance on the PST-Verbal subtest, the PST-Spatial subtest, and overall problem-solving performance. Surprisingly stronger relationships were found, however, between spatial skills and PST-Verbal performance than between verbal skills and PSTVerbal performance, and stronger relationships were found between verbal skills and PST-Spatial performance than between spatial skills and PST-Spatial performance. Statistically significant pair-wise relationships were also found among the cognitive skills, with the strongest pair-wise relationship existing between verbal and analytical viii skills. The relationship between verbal and spatial skills, although not as strong as the one that exists between verbal and analytical skills, was also quite strong. PH.D in Mathematics Education, December 2012 Show less
