The effect of working memory supporting strategies on primary school second year students' perceptions of number sense and mathematics self-efficacy

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of the design created in accordance with Gagne's Instructional Model and by including memory supporters in the cognitive strategy stimuli suggested by the theory and supporting working memory on students' number sense and self-efficacy perceptions in mathematics. Working memory forms the basis of children's mathematics learning and performance (Geary, Hoard, Nugent, & Bailey, 2012; LeFevre, DeStefano, Coleman, & Shanahan, 2005; Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010). In the development of mathematical skills, working memory is used for verbal counting (Geary Hoard, Byrd-Craven, & DeSoto, 2004; Krajewski & Schneider, 2009), retrieval of mathematical rules directly from memory (Barrouillet & Lépine, 2005), choosing the appropriate solution strategy (Bull & Scerif, 2001; DeStefano & LeFevre, 2004), following the steps of complex mathematical problems (Imbo, Vandierendonck, & De Rammelaere, 2007a; Imbo, Vandierendonck, & Vergauwe, 2007b), and performing intermediate calculations during mental processing (Adams & Hitch, 1997). Number sense is the ability to handle numbers, operations and everyday situations involving numbers. This skill is used to develop effective and flexible strategies for handling numerical problems. Number sense is seen as one of the three fundamental aspects of arithmetic teaching. The other two of these three aspects are calculation and problem solving.This study investigates to what extent second-grade primary school students' number sense perceptions improve with strategies that support working memory. In addition, thanks to the studies conducted, it was also found out how the perception of selfefficacy towards mathematics course changed. "Pretest-posttest control group model", one of the quasi-experimental designs, was used in the research. The study was conducted with 39 students attending the 2nd grade at a private primary school in Istanbul in 2021-2022 academic year. Necessary permissions were obtained for the experimental application and data collection. The participants were administered the Working Memory Scale to measure their capacities related to the central executive, phonological loop and visuospatial elements of working memory, the Number Sense Scale to measure their number sense perceptions, and the Mathematics Self-Efficacy Perception Scale to measure their perceptions of mathematics course. According to the findings obtained from the research, it was seen that the design prepared with strategies supporting working memory based on Gagné's Instructional Situations Model showed a statistically difference in favour of the experimental group in students' number sense skills in mathematics and self-efficacy perceptions towards mathematics. In this study, descriptive statistics, normality analysis, and statistical methods such as the Mann-Whitney U test, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Levene's test, independent samples t-test, paired samples t-test, and correlation analysis were employed.