ABSTRACT
Students display various modes of thinking such as intuitions, pseudo-analytic processes, automatic, and analytic thinking while doing mathematics. Learning mathematics requires the activation of cognitive processes such as executive functions and metacognition. Many common mistakes detected in students’ mathematical problem-solving processes are explained by intuitions, automatic thinking, and lack of inhibitory control processes, that is, the ability to suppress automatic and quick interference resulting from task-irrelevant variables. Metacognition, on the other hand, has been observed to play a role in facilitating the shift from automatic to analytic thinking processes in reasoning tasks including mathematical problems. Considering the contribution of both inhibition as an executive function and metacognition as a meta-level construct to mathematics performance, this study investigated the relationship between the inhibition, metacognition, and mathematics performance of middle school students. The findings revealed that there is not a significant relationship between metacognition and cognitive inhibition revealing that they were separate constructs. There was a significant relationship between metacognition and mathematics performance measures. Inhibition, on the other hand, was only slightly associated with mathematics grades with a low coefficient. The results emphasised the major role of metacognition as an analytic thinking structure in mathematics performance when compared to the role of cognitive inhibition.
