Background. Longitudinal studies allow us to identify, which specific maths skills are weak in young children, and whether there is a continuing weakness in these areas throughout their school years.

This study identified the cognitive processes that underlie the individual differences in early mathematical performance in elementary school children. Taking into account the Baddeley framework multicomponent model, the inhibitory processes, working memory, phonological awareness, and naming speed are considered to be related to early math learning. To examine this relationship, we compared the performance of a total of 424 typically developing middle-class children, aged between 4 and 7 years in a battery of cognitive and early numeric tests: The Utrecht Early Numeracy Test, the Rapid Automatized Naming Test, Spanish version of the Stroop task, the Numeracy Interference Test, Digit Span test, and Phonological Knowledge Test. The mean age of the participants was 72.21 months (sd = 14.8), and 48.6% were male and 51.4% were female. The results demonstrated that children performing worst on central executive, phonological processing, and inhibitory processes showed lower results in early mathematical tasks measured by The Utrecht Early Numeracy Test. Results supported the notion that the executive system is an important predictor of children's mathematical performance.

El Test de Evaluación Matemática Temprana está orientado a medir el nivel de competencia matemática temprana. Se ha desarrollado para de educación infantil y 1º y 2º de primaria. Dispone de tres versiones paralelas, de 40 ítems cada una. Consta de 8 tareas, divididas en grupos de 5: Comparación, clasificación, correspondencia, seriación, conteo verbal, conteo estructurado, conteo resultante y conocimiento general de los números. Tiene una puntuación máxima de 40 puntos (uno por cada ítem correcto). El objetivo fundamental de este estudio consistió en adaptar el test a la población española con todas las garantías de validez y fiabilidad, que permita tener un instrumento para detectar posibles problemas en el aprendizaje de las matemáticas en los inicios de la escolaridad. El TEMT se ha baremado con una muestra de 1.053 niños/as pertenecientes a 14 colegios. 539 eran varones y 514 mujeres. Nos da un índice cuantitativo del nivel de competencia matemática temprana, posee un buen valor predictivo sobre el rendimiento matemático y los valores de validez y fiabilidad obtenidos cumplen con los criterios estándar.Palabras clave: Matemática temprana, cognición, evaluación, educación infantil, educación primaria, sentido numérico.

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Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have an increasing influence on the way we interact, learn, and live. The increase in teaching and learning methodologies that are mediated by ICT in the field of education and in the domestic settings encourages the design of new effective technological tools, supported by scientific research and development to improve student learning. The challenge psychology is facing in the education field is to promote those technologies and make them available to the education community. Technologies also would produce attractive items for users and realistic commercial issues for businesses. This also allows an effective transfer for scientific work, providing visibility to Research and Development. In this context, the main aim of the article is to describe the process to get an agreement between Babyradio (a children’s entertainment company: https://babyradio.es/) and our research team, starting a collaborative work between two groups of people (Babyradio’s technical designer and Psychologist-Engineers software designer), in order to create several educative applications (APPs) in the field of early mathematics cognition. The institutional framework of the relationship of the R&D project and a children’s entertainment company is described. The article also focuses on experience in Psychology, Technological Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. In considering the efficiency of the agreement, we present different APPs designed for tablets and smartphone devices, adapted to the different operating systems (IOS, Android, Windows). APPs are designed to instill the cognitive fundamentals associated with early math learning for students aged 4 to 7 years. The study developed after this babyradio-university enterprise agreement contributes to the development of mathematics skills in children, aged 4–7 years, so that they can successfully meet the mathematics school requirements; it also contributes to encouraging a more positive attitude toward mathematics. This study also suggests how the education system and software and educational content developers’ companies would manage verified instructional APPs, with a more realistic commercial perspective.

Attention disorders are one of the major sources of poor school performance. This research project was designed to examine whether a Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) approach would be successful in achieving higher rates of attention. In order to increase attention behaviour during school time, psychologically‐designed software was developed. The software, called “How to improve your mental skills,” consists of three games based on multimedia perception tasks. First, 155 elementary school children with an average age of 12.4 years, from Cadiz (Spain) School District, were evaluated with two attention tests, the Perception Differences Test (PDT), and the subtest Spatial of Primary Mental Aptitude (S‐PMA). Students were divided and balanced into one experimental and two control groups, according to their scores on the PDT. Then, 10 training sessions, of 25 minutes each, with the software “How to improve your mental skills”, were administered to the experimental group. Children from control group 1 played with a well‐known computer game during the same period of time, whereas children from control group 2 remained in the classroom with nonspecific training. Finally, after the experimental sessions, all the children were re‐evaluated with standard attention tests. Analyses of data included: (1) pre‐ and post‐training comparison of the experimental group scores on the PDT; (2) comparison of the experimental and control group 1 and 2 scores on the PDT and S‐PMA tests after training; and (3) gender and grade interference effects on attention behaviour. Results suggest that children from the experimental group significantly improved their attention behaviour as assessed by the PDT and S‐PMA tests after 10 training sessions with the specific computer software. No gender and grade interference effects on attention behaviour were found. Les désordres d'attention sont une des sources majeures de pauvre performance scolaire. Ce projet de recherche fut conçu pour examiner comment une approche d'enseignement assisté par ordinateur peut être efficace pour obtenir de plus hauts niveaux d'attention. Afin d'augmenter le comportement d'attention en classe, un programme informatique intitulé «Comment améliorer vos habiletés mentales» fut développé. Ce programme, basé sur la psychologie de la peception, consiste en trois jeux multimédias interactifs. L'étude s'est déroulée en trois phases. Premièrement, 155 enfants de L'école primaire, âgés en moyenne de 12,4 ans et issus du district scolaire de Cadiz, en Espagne, furent évalués à partir de deux tests d'attention: le Perception Differences Test (PDT) et le sous‐test Spatial of Primary Mental Aptitude (S‐PMA). Les élèves furent divisés en trois groupes, un groupe expérimental et deux groupes contrôle, en fonction de leur score au PDT. En deuxième lieu, le groupe expérimental fut soumis à 10 sessions d'entraînement, chacune d'une durée de 25 minutes, lors desquelles le programme informatique « Comment améliorer vos habiletés mentales » fut administré. Les enfants du premier groupe co...

Computer-assisted learning can be an efficient learning-teaching procedure. Although there is an extensive educational software tradition for this approach, few have better performance than standard drill-and-practice methods. In this work, the specific software "Let's Play With..." was designed to teach concepts of colours, shapes, and body position to children with intellectual disabilities. The software structure follows the Gagné instructional design and applied behaviour analysis. The program was carried out with 39 boys and 21 girls who were special education students in the Cadiz School District. Statistically significant differences were found between groups taught with and without the software.

Las Tecnologías del Aprendizaje y el Conocimiento (TAC) tienen una influencia cada vez mayor en la manera de mediar el aprendizaje de los más jóvenes. El incremento del proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje mediado por las TAC en el ámbito de la educación y en el ámbito doméstico, induce a la creación de nuevas herramientas efectivas, avaladas por la ciencia y diseñadas para mejorar el aprendizaje de nuestros alumnos. El desafío al que se enfrenta la psicología de la educación consiste en fomentar éstas tecnologías y ponerlas al servicio de la comunidad educativa y sin perder de vista el hecho de generar productos atractivos para los usuarios y que puedan generar rendimiento comercial para las empresas. Pretendiendo generar además de una transferencia efectiva de la labor científica, el aumento en la visibilidad de la investigación. En este trabajo, presentamos 9 aplicaciones (APPs) diseñadas para Tablet y Smartphone, adaptadas a los diferentes sistemas operativos actuales, destinadas a trabajar sobre las bases cognitivas asociadas con el aprendizaje de la matemática temprana. Con el objeto de crear una herramienta atractiva para el alumnado de 4 a 7 años, se ha contado con la colaboración de la empresa de entretenimiento y divulgación infantil Babyradio, colaborando en el desarrollo gráfico y en la transferencia de los resultados de la inves tigación. Una vez demostrada la validez empírica de estas APPs, los maestros, el sistema educativo y las empresas de software dispondrían de un material de apoyo didáctico contrastado. El objetivo principal del trabajo es contribuir en el desarrollo de las habilidades matemáticas de los niños de 4 a 7 años para que estos puedan afrontar con éxito los requerimientos de la escuela y para que puedan resolver situaciones en sus vidas diarias, promoviendo por otro lado, el cambio actitudinal del alumnado con respecto a las matemáticas