What difference does a year of schooling make?

Abstract

Early elementary schooling in 2nd and 3rd grades (ages 7-9) is an important period for the acquisition and mastery of basic mathematical skills. Yet, we know very little about neurodevelopmental changes that might occur over a year of schooling. Here we examine behavioral and neurodevelopmental changes underlying arithmetic problem solving in a well-matched group of 2nd (n = 45) and 3rd (n = 45) grade children. Although 2nd and 3rd graders did not differ on IQ or grade- and age-normed measures of math, reading and working memory, 3rd graders had higher raw math scores (effect sizes = 1.46-1.49) and were more accurate than 2nd graders in an fMRI task involving verification of simple and complex two-operand addition problems (effect size = 0.43). In both 2nd and 3rd graders, arithmetic complexity was associated with increased responses in right inferior frontal sulcus and anterior insula, regions implicated in domain-general cognitive control, and in left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and superior parietal lobule (SPL) regions important for numerical and arithmetic processing. Compared to 2nd graders, 3rd graders showed greater activity in dorsal stream parietal areas right SPL, IPS and angular gyrus (AG) as well as ventral visual stream areas bilateral lingual gyrus (LG), right lateral occipital cortex (LOC) and right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG). Significant differences were also observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), with 3rd graders showing greater activation in left dorsal lateral PFC (dlPFC) and greater deactivation in the ventral medial PFC (vmPFC). Third graders also showed greater functional connectivity between the left dlPFC and multiple posterior brain areas, with larger differences in dorsal stream parietal areas SPL and AG, compared to ventral stream visual areas LG, LOC and PHG. No such between-grade differences were observed in functional connectivity between the vmPFC and posterior brain regions. These results suggest that even the narrow one-year interval spanning grades 2 and 3 is characterized by significant arithmetic task-related changes in brain response and connectivity, and argue that pooling data across wide age ranges and grades can miss important neurodevelopmental changes. Our findings have important implications for understanding brain mechanisms mediating early maturation of mathematical skills and, more generally, for educational neuroscience.

Functional neuroanatomy of arithmetic and word reading and its relationship to age

“…While this increased engagement could result from increased task difficulty for subtraction relative to addition and reading, we found that the result remained the same with or without reaction time entered as a covariate of no interest. This is in concordance with previous investigations that have identified the IPS in quantitative processing during arithmetic tasks in both adults (Dehaene and Cohen, 1997; Lee, 2000; Rosenberg-Lee et al, 2011a) and children (De Smedt et al, 2011; Rosenberg-Lee et al, 2011b), particularly for tasks including the operations of subtraction and division. Also, lesions to the right inferior parietal cortex manifest in quantitative arithmetic knowledge impairments (e.g., subtraction) but preserve rote arithmetic knowledge (e.g., addition; Dehaene and Cohen, 1997).…”

“…Previous work has demonstrated that left MFG activity (more anterior to that reported here), within dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, increases with age during addition problem solving from second to third grade (Rosenberg-Lee et al, 2011b). This together with the finding presented here strongly supports an age-dependent effect specific to addition.…”

Weak task-related modulation and stimulus representations during arithmetic problem solving in children with developmental dyscalculia

“…The loci of deficits in the DD group can be categorized into three major brain systems that are important for numerical cognition – the dorsal visual stream, the ventral visual stream and the PFC (Arsalidou and Taylor, 2011; Rivera et al, 2005; Rosenberg-Lee et al, 2011a). In the dorsal visual stream, DD children had deficits in both lateral PPC, including the right IPS, SPL and AG, and medial PPC, including the precuneus.…”

“…We examined whether children with DD exhibit modulation of brain responses in relation to arithmetic problem complexity in the same manner as TD children by using whole-brain analyses, as well as anatomically based ROI analyses. We used cytoarchitectonically defined maps of the IPS (Choi et al, 2006; Scheperjans et al, 2008) to more precisely examine differential brain responses to the Complex and Simple problems in children with DD (Rosenberg-Lee et al, 2011a). In addition to voxel-wise analyses, we also examined multi-voxel activation patterns using representational similarity analysis (RSA).…”

Visual-spatial abilities relate to mathematics achievement in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure.

“…Parietal regions have been implicated in mathematical function across a wide range of populations, including typically developing children (Cantlon et al, 2011; Davis et al, 2009; Rosenberg-Lee, Barth, & Menon, 2011) and children with developmental disorders (Kesler, Menon, & Reiss, 2006; Lebel, Rasmussen, Wyper, Andrew, & Beaulieu, 2010; Meintjes et al, 2010; Price, Holloway, Rasanen, Vesterinen, & Ansari, 2007; Santhanam, Li, Hu, Lynch, & Coles, 2009). Children with FASD have been reported to have thicker cortices (Sowell et al, 2008) and smaller volumes (Archibald et al, 2001) in parietal regions relative to controls, and these abnormalities may be related to their decreased mathematics abilities demonstrated in school and on neuropsychological testing (Riikonen, Salonen, Partanen, & Verho, 1999).…”