Resumen

International tests of massive application allow evaluating how individual, institutional, national, and family factors contribute to students’ educational achievement through their performance. Consequently, education evaluation is based on the paradigm of general and specific competencies for life. One of these general competencies is the capacity to solve mathematical problems and apply logical thinking to problem-solving. In order to evaluate this general competence, standardized tests have been developed. Among these tests, the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) in 2013 evaluated the mathematical and other areas’ academic performance of children in the third and sixth grade. The TERCE Mathematics evaluation allows researchers to capture the students’ academic performance in five domains: numeric, geometric, measurement, statistics, and variation, as well as their cognitive performance in objects and elements recognition and simple and complex problem-solving. In addition, to evaluate these eight dimensions, the TERCE test also asks for information regarding academic context, family environment, and teachers, among others. Despite this information, in Colombia and in general, the evaluation of the socioeconomic context over academic performance has been studied mainly considering the schools’ characteristics, families’ economic levels, and public expenses. Therefore, there is little evidence of the effects of psycho-pedagogical and psychological factors on academic performance. Psycho-pedagogical models emphasize the dependence of the superior processes on perceptual and attentional processes and the need for activities that demand deep processing and active involvement with information before, during, and after classes. Thus, attending simultaneously to different elements affects the development of cognitive control functions, which leads to low academic achievement and performance. Frequently, students face academic activities in different scenarios where the attentional system should divide its resources between several stimulus sources. Activities in which the attentional system focuses are “essential processing”, and those not related to the main academic activity are called “incidental processing”. Consequently, increasing the sources of incidental processing would decrease the attentional resources devoted to the essential processing of educational activities producing low academic performance. In this context, the study proposes and evaluates an effects model focused on essential and incidental cognitive processing of academic activities. The information was captured on the mathematics performance of sixth-grade students from 15 countries (and the state of Nuevo León de México) participating in the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE). A Structural Equations model was formulated using indices of Essential Processing (Attentional Control, Working Memory, and Family Super- vision) and Incidental

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