How can 'you' support children’s maths word problem solving?

When information is related to the Self, this prompts processing biases including increased attention and memory. Research has shown that when self-cues are included in educational tasks such as mathematical processing, there can be an increase in children’s task performance. We report two experiments that investigated the educational applications of Self in maths . A self-cue, the personal pronoun ‘you’, was included in maths word problems completed by 7 – 11-year-old (Exp 1) and 9 – 11-year-old children (Exp 2). Task difficulty was manipulated by including addition and subtraction questions (Exp 1, Exp 2), a different quantity of referents (Exp 1), and lexically consistent and inconsistent questions (Exp 2). Accuracy and response time data showed that self-cues tended to facilitate performance, but the effect varied by condition. In Exp 1, self-cues enhanced answer accuracy when problems included a single referent, but had no significant effect on response time. In Exp 2, response time and accuracy were both significantly higher in problems that included a self-cue. Furthermore, unlike Exp 1 the accuracy advantage for self-pronoun problems was greater in higher difficulty questions, with a significant self-advantage emerging in subtraction but not addition questions, and in lexically inconsistent word problems but not consistent problems. The research demonstrates the conditional effectiveness of applying self-cues in maths word problem solving, suggesting that including personal pronouns can significantly facilitate numerical processing in children, but this effect varies by task difficulty.