New Delhi: Why are some children bad at maths? A new study by Stanford University offers some answers. Researchers have found that children with a math learning disability struggle to keep up with the appropriate pace and are even slower to recover after making mistakes. This is exacerbated especially when they are dealing with numerical problems.
The research, led by Hyesang Chang at Stanford University, was published in The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggested that math disability stems from a child’s cognitive ability to adjust their thinking process while working through a problem.
The researchers studied the brain activity of 87 children in second and third grades, who were asked to complete a series of comparison tasks. It showed different levels of activity in regions responsible for executive function, similar to air traffic control, enabling focused attention, as well as in areas involved in detecting and correcting errors, the report said.
“These findings provide novel support for a multidimensional deficit view of MLD that extends beyond basic number processing to include metacognitive processes,” the study found.
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Underlying neurocognitive mechanisms
Researchers found that the children solved problems in two ways: either by comparing groups of dots of different sizes or by comparing Arabic numerals. The researchers scanned the children’s brains using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Different regions of the brain involved in performing tasks were monitored while they performed the task.
“What we found was that children with math learning disability show specific difficulties with symbolic numbers, and particularly with updating their strategy as they worked with number symbols,” co-lead Hyesang Chang, PHD, a former research scientist at Stanford Medicine told Stanford Medicine.
A clear pattern emerged — children with maths problems didn’t change strategy despite getting the problem wrong. This suggested, to the researchers, that despite making an error, the children didn’t try to upgrade their thinking pattern.
This difficulty in behaviour adjustment despite having made an error was one of the stark differences between children with maths disability and those without it.
The researchers found that the region of the brain involved in solving math problems is also linked to cognitive control.
“Combining DDM-DPM with functional brain imaging, we examined symbolic and non-symbolic quantity discrimination in female and male children with MLD (mathematical learning disabilities) and typically developing children matched on age, gender and IQ,” the research found.
Speaking to Science Daily, Chang said that this reflected the broader implications of the learning disability. “These impairments may not necessarily be specific to numerical skills, and could apply to broader cognitive abilities that involve monitoring task performance and adapting behaviour as a child learns.”
“Our findings suggest that interventions should target not only basic number sense, but also metacognitive processes, like performance monitoring — how do you adjust when you notice an error,” said senior author Vinod Menon told Stanford Medicine.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)