Trends in Neuroscience and Education最新文献

Background and Purpose

We examined students perceived changes in their attention, motivation, affect, and time perception following the implementation of the pandemic-related restrictions.

Methods

One year after the restrictions were implemented, we surveyed students’ (N = 153) perceived changes in their experiences relative to their remembered pre- and early-pandemic ones, as well as their predicted future changes.

Results

Consistent with prior work, when students compared their current experiences (March/April 2021) to their remembered pre-pandemic ones, they perceived increases in mind-wandering, technology use, external distraction, and negative affect, as well as decreases in focus, flow, motivation, and time perception. Although somewhat attenuated, students also noted changes in these behaviours when comparing the memory of their early pandemic experiences to their current experiences. Finally, they further anticipated negative changes in their future experiences, possibly due to continued pandemic-related isolation.

Implications

Reducing students’ sense of isolation might improve their cognitive and affective experiences.

Recent educational trends point to an interest in educational neurotechnology. While these tools have the potential to change education, little is known about whether their use improves educational outcomes. Additionally, their adoption may be negatively impacted by teachers’ lack of knowledge about the brain. In this paper we outline the potential of educational neurotechnology including what we know, what we do not yet know, and additional considerations for the ethical, successful adoption of these tools in classrooms around the world. Special consideration is given to the training needs of pre- and in-service educators whose support will be essential to the successful adoption of educational neurotechnology.

Background

Previous research suggests that visuospatial working memory (WM) is a unique predictor of mathematics. However, evidence from neuropsychology and cognitive studies suggests dissociations between visual and spatial WM.

Procedure

We examined the differential relationships between visual and spatial WM with mathematics using a new task that 1) utilized the same paradigm across visual and spatial tasks and 2) required executive WM.

Main findings

We found that our new spatial WM task related to mathematics scores while visual WM did not. Spatial WM related to mathematics scores for fourth-graders and not second graders, consistent with previous findings on the relationship between spatial skills and mathematics as mathematics becomes more complex. No relationship was found between spatial WM and reading scores at either grade level.

Conclusions

Our results highlight the dynamic relationship between WM components and mathematics over the elementary school years and suggest that spatial WM is a unique predictor of mathematics starting from middle childhood.

Purpose

Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play.

Procedures

We tested whether children's executive function relates to mother-child synchrony during physical and digital play in sixty mother-child dyads.

Main findings

Mother-child synchrony did not relate to children's executive function or differ by play type (physical, digital), though during digital play mother-child synchrony was higher for girls relative to boys.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that mother-child synchrony is not influenced by children's executive function and physical and digital play can be similarly beneficial in offering the opportunity for responsive, reciprocal, dynamic interactions. The sex difference suggests that further factors should be explored as influences of play synchrony.

Background

One frequent learning obstacle in mathematics is conceptual interference. However, the majority of research on conceptual interference has focused on science. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we examined the conceptual interference effects in both mathematics and science and the moderating influence of mathematical expertise.

Methods

Thirty adult mathematicians and 31 gender-, age-, and intelligence-matched non-mathematicians completed a speeded reasoning tasks with statements from mathematics and science. Statements were either congruent (true or false according to both scientifically and naïve theories) or incongruent (differed in their truth value).

Findings

Both groups exhibited more errors and a slower response time when evaluating incongruent compared to congruent statements in the science and mathematics task, but mathematicians were less affected by naïve theories. In mathematics, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was activated when inhibiting naïve theories, while in science it was the dorsolateral and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally. Mathematical expertise did not moderate the conceptual interference effect at the neural level.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that naïve theories in mathematics are still present in mathematicians, even though they are less affected by them in performance than novices. In addition, the differential brain activation in the mathematics and science task indicates that the extent of inhibitory control processes to resolve conceptual interference depends on the quality of the involved concepts.

Background

A large body of research has found stronger math anxiety in females and suggests that inferior spatial abilities (or attributes towards spatial abilities) in females compared to males are the origin of sex differences in math anxiety.

Purpose

To fully explore the complex relationship among math anxiety, spatial abilities, math performance and sex differences, the current study examined spatial skills, working memory skills, math anxiety, and self-efficacy as predictors of math performance.

Basic procedures

Participating in the study were 89 undergraduate Israeli students (44 males and 45 females).

Main findings

The result showed sex differences in a few domains: math anxiety was higher in females compared to males, males outperformed females in number line performance and spatial skills. The relationships among spatial abilities, math performance, and math anxiety were stronger in males than in females. By contrast, the relationship between math self-efficacy and performance was stronger in females compared to males.

Conclusions

This finding demonstrated fundamental differences between the sexes, even with similar performances in curriculum-based assessments.

Understanding how children acquire mathematical abilities is fundamental to planning mathematical schooling. This study focuses on the relationships between mathematical cognition, cognition in general and neural foundation in 8 to 9-year-old children. We used additive mathematics tests, cognitive tests determining the tendency for proactive and reactive problem solving and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for functional brain imaging. The ability to engage in proactive control had a stronger association with mathematical performance than other cognitive abilities, such as processing speed, sustained attention and pattern recognition. The fNIRS method identified differences between proactive and reactive control, i.e., the more proactive the children were, the greater the increase in oxygenated hemoglobin in the left lateral prefrontal cortex during reactive beneficiary situations. During a text-based task involving additive reasoning, increased activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex was detected compared to a similar task with supportive spatial-geometric information.

Background

Children's executive functions develop rapidly during the preschool years and are critical for attending to lessons and meeting classroom expectations. Engaging in periods of outdoor play that have lower regulatory requirements and that provide opportunities for physical activity may help children maintain control over their behavior when they are back in settings with higher regulatory requirements. However, little work has formally examined this proposition in early childhood.

Methods

This study used a quasi-experimental design to examine preschoolers' executive functions following indoor compared to outdoor play. A total of 72 children (mean age = 4.5 years, 46% female, 73% non-Hispanic White) participated in task-based assessments of attention shifting and inhibitory control and in classroom observations of attention and inhibitory control. A subsample of the children (n = 51) was assessed for physical activity using accelerometry to examine the extent to which young children's physical activity during outdoor play predicted their subsequent executive functions better than their physical activity during indoor play.

Results

Children showed greater attention during classroom circle time following outdoor play compared to after indoor play (d = .34). Children's non-sedentary activity during indoor play was not related to their subsequent task-based executive functions but showed negative associations with their subsequent classroom-based executive functions. Children's percentage of time spent in non-sedentary physical activity during outdoor play showed a quadratic association with subsequent task-based inhibitory control but linear associations with subsequent classroom-based attention and inhibitory control during circle time.

Conclusion

Periods of outdoor play that involve recommended amounts of physical activity may help young children engage executive functions when they return to the classroom.