Bridging cognition and emotion: A developmental model of quantitative skills growth in postsecondary education

The interaction between cognition and emotional regulation is key to the acquisition of academic skills, and, at present, theoretical frameworks that combine these two aspects in the context of Postsecondary Education are underdeveloped. This paper will model how cognitive and emotional variables interact to contribute to the Development of quantitative skills in undergraduate students. We examined the two-way interaction among mathematics anxiety, self-efficacy beliefs, working memory capacity, and performance trajectories on quantitative reasoning tasks using a longitudinal dataset from three public universities (collected between September 2021 and June 2024). A total of 412 undergraduate students across three academic years took part in the study. Latent growth curve analyses and structural equation modelling indicated that academic self-efficacy mediated the association between working memory capacity and quantitative skill growth, and that students with higher baseline self-efficacy showed steeper improvement over time, whereas chronic mathematics anxiety attenuated gains even among students with strong working memory. The proposed developmental model distinguishes four stages of skill acquisition—initiation, consolidation, integration, and autonomous use—each characterized by a distinct cognitive-emotional configuration, with the consolidation stage emerging as a particularly important window for emotion-regulation support. The findings also continue the cognitive-load and social-cognitive theories by anticipating the role of affective variables as active agents of Development rather than passive moderators. The implications of the results on curriculum design, academic support services, and educator training in Postsecondary Education are addressed.