The role of working memory updating, inhibition, fluid intelligence, and reading comprehension in explaining differences between consistent and inconsistent arithmetic word-problem-solving performance

Children's performance in arithmetic word problems (AWPs) pre-dicts their academic success and their future employment and earnings in adulthood. Understanding the nature and difficulties of interpreting and solving AWPs is important for theoretical, edu-cational, and social reasons. We investigated the relation between primary school children's performance in different types of AWPs and their basic cognitive abilities (reading comprehension, fluid intelligence, inhibition, and updating processes). The study involved 182 fourth-and fifth-graders. Participants were adminis-tered an AWP-solving task and other tasks assessing fluid intelli-gence, reading comprehension, inhibition, and updating. The AWP-solving task included comparison problems incorporating either the adverb more than or the adverb less than, which demand consistent or inconsistent operations of addition or subtraction. The results showed that consistent problems were easier than inconsistent problems. Efficiency in solving inconsistent problems is related to inhibition and updating. Moreover, our results seem to indicate that the consistency effect is related to updating pro-cesses' efficiency. Path analyses showed that reading comprehen-sion was the most important predictor of AWP-solving accuracy. Moreover, both executive functions-updating and inhibition-had a distinct and significant effect on AWP accuracy. Fluid intelligence had both direct and indirect effects, mediated by reading compre-hension, on the overall measure of AWP performance. These domain-general factors are important factors in explaining chil-dren's performance in solving consistent and inconsistent AWPs.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.