Inhibitory Control Training for Anxiety and Math Achievement in Primary School Children: Protocol for a Proof-of-Concept Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cognitive control training (CCT) has shown potential to reduce emotional vulnerability in adults and adolescents. However, there is scant literature testing the efficacy of CCT for the reduction of anxiety and transferring the effects to educational outcomes in children. Building on the evidence that a greater ability to suppress a prepotent response (inhibitory control) is associated with higher math achievement in children, it is plausible that training inhibitory processes using a CCT paradigm may be beneficial for reducing anxiety, improving inhibitory control, and in turn increasing math achievement. OBJECTIVE: This proof-of-concept study aims to investigate the efficacy of 15 sessions of inhibitory control training for reduction in anxiety and improvement in math achievement in primary school children. METHODS: We will use a 2 (group: CCT, adaptive Go/No-Go vs active control, low-load task) multiplied by 4 (time: pre- vs posttraining vs 1-month vs 3-month follow-up) randomized design in a nonselected sample of 100 children aged 8-10 years. Both groups will complete 10 minutes of daily training for 3 weeks at school. The dependent variables will be anxiety and correlates (Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children, Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scale, Child Response Style Questionnaire, and Modified Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale), inhibitory control (Go/No-Go task), shifting (color-shape shifting task), updating (n-back task), and math achievement (Applied Problems, Calculation, and Math Facts Fluency subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement). RESULTS: We opened enrollment in September 2023. The initial results are expected to be published in late 2024. We predict that children in the CCT group will show a reduction in emotional symptoms; improvements in inhibition, shifting, and updating performance; and advances in math achievement from pre- to posttraining, and that these effects will be maintained at 1- and 3-month follow-ups, compared to children in the active control group. CONCLUSIONS: The CCT paradigm used in our study will provide a greater understanding of the emotional and cognitive transfer effects on children and inform future work. Specifically, the findings will advance the knowledge of deploying inhibitory control training with children and provide valuable insights into its use for reducing anxiety and advancing math achievement. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Open Science Framework ofs.io/de2qa; https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/DE2QA. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/52929.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".