Positive Attitude Toward Math Supports Early Academic Success: Behavioral Evidence and Neurocognitive Mechanisms

Abstract

Positive attitude is thought to impact academic achievement and learning in children, but little is known about its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Using a large behavioral sample of 240 children, we found that positive attitude toward math uniquely predicted math achievement, even after we accounted for multiple other cognitive-affective factors. We then investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the link between positive attitude and academic achievement in two independent cohorts of children (discovery cohort: n = 47; replication cohort: n = 28) and tested competing hypotheses regarding the differential roles of affective-motivational and learning-memory systems. In both cohorts, we found that positive attitude was associated with increased engagement of the hippocampal learning-memory system. Structural equation modeling further revealed that, in both cohorts, increased hippocampal activity and more frequent use of efficient memory-based strategies mediated the relation between positive attitude and higher math achievement. Our study is the first to elucidate the neurocognitive mechanisms by which positive attitude influences learning and academic achievement.

Keywords: attitudes; brain; childhood development; learning; mathematics achievement.

Fig. 1.

Overall study design in Cohort 1 and behavioral results. In this study, (a) 240 children underwent extensive neuropsychological assessments of cognitive abilities and attitude. Fifty-three participated in the functional MRI (fMRI) study and completed a session designed to assess use of efficient memory-based strategies. The scatterplots (b; with best-fitting regression lines) show the relation between each of four measures of academic achievement and mean positive attitude toward math (PAM) score. Measures of academic achievement were obtained from the four standardized subscales of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test–Second Edition (Wechsler, 2001).

Fig. 2.

Correlation between positive attitude toward math (PAM) and right hippocampal activation, separately for (a) Cohort 1 (n = 47), (b) Cohort 2 (n = 28), and (c) the overlap between Cohorts 1 and 2. The brain slices in each panel show regions with significant activation (highlighted in the blue circles). The scatterplots (with best-fitting regression lines) show (a) peak activation as a function of mean PAM score and (b) peak activation as a function of mean PAM score and trials on which problems were correctly or incorrectly solved.

Fig. 3.

Hypothetical models of the brain-behavior relationship and best-fitting models for Cohorts 1 and 2. The three possible structural equation models (a) illustrate how hippocampal activation mediates the relation between positive attitude toward math (PAM) and math achievement. The full-retrieval-based model tested the hypothesis that the effect of PAM on math achievement would be fully mediated by hippocampal activation and memory retrieval; the partial-retrieval-based model tested the hypothesis that the hippocampus may contribute to cognitive functions, including retrieval of math facts; and the non-retrieval-based model tested the hypothesis that PAM would increase activation in the hippocampus and lead to better math achievement scores independently of memory retrieval use. The best-fitting models (b) are shown for Cohort 1 and Cohort 2. The values on each path are standardized estimates of path coefficients; solid lines indicate significant paths (*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001), and dashed lines indicate nonsignificant paths. In all models, hippocampal activation was determined using beta values from the region-of-interest analysis in the right hippocampus, positive attitude was based on PAM scores, memory retrieval rate was assessed using strategy assessments, and math achievement represented individual scores on the Numerical Operations subtest of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test–Second Edition (Wechsler, 2001).