Study Links Students’ Income Levels To Their Working Memory
- 8 years ago
There may be a link between the income level of a student’s family and his or her working memory, finds a recently published study.
There may be a link between the income level of a student’s family and his or her working memory, finds a recently published study.
A University of Toronto press release about the research describes a person’s working memory as “a key brain function responsible for everything from remembering a phone number to doing math in your head.”
The study also notes that it is “associated with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks and education outcomes, including mathematics achievement.”
For the experiment, the team mapped the brain activity of 67 demographically diverse seventh and eighth graders in schools around the Boston area.
According to the study, "Findings indicate that the functional neural architecture of WM [working memory] varies with family income and is associated with education measures of mathematics achievement."
The researchers found that the students from the lower-income group used the more advanced thinking parts of their brains even for simpler tasks whereas the higher-income kids began to access these areas for more difficult problems.
While the data indicates that young people from upper and lower economic backgrounds process information differently, researchers emphasize that the brain can be adapted with training.
There may be a link between the income level of a student’s family and his or her working memory, finds a recently published study.
A University of Toronto press release about the research describes a person’s working memory as “a key brain function responsible for everything from remembering a phone number to doing math in your head.”
The study also notes that it is “associated with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks and education outcomes, including mathematics achievement.”
For the experiment, the team mapped the brain activity of 67 demographically diverse seventh and eighth graders in schools around the Boston area.
According to the study, "Findings indicate that the functional neural architecture of WM [working memory] varies with family income and is associated with education measures of mathematics achievement."
The researchers found that the students from the lower-income group used the more advanced thinking parts of their brains even for simpler tasks whereas the higher-income kids began to access these areas for more difficult problems.
While the data indicates that young people from upper and lower economic backgrounds process information differently, researchers emphasize that the brain can be adapted with training.