Statistical Evidence of the Correlation between Mental Ability to Compute and Student Performance in Undergraduate Courses

摘要

In recent years, many studies have suggested the hypothesis that mental ability to compute is essential for many activities and is as fundamental as reading, writing and arithmetic. This work provides mathematical arguments to verification of this hypothesis. Assuming a precise statement of what is to compute, based on the model of computation "Turing Machine", we found experimentally the existence of a correlation, statistically significant, between mental ability to compute and student performance in four different university courses.