Category Archives: Research

Counting is not as easy as you think

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Dyscalculia: News from the web:

Brand new research coming that looks into counting and why young children tend to count all things instead of groups of things when asked that.

You need to read the whole research but here are the highlights

Highlights

  • Children tend to count discrete physical items when asked to count abstract units
  • This tendency may result from an incomplete understanding of units, counting or both
  • Many children demonstrated correct understanding of units but incorrect counting
  • Emerging understanding of counting may explain incorrect counting of abstract units

Read all about it: HERE

The importance of Brain Breaks

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In the classroom, “brain breaks should take place before fatigue, boredom, distraction, and inattention set in,” writes neurologist and classroom teacher Judy Willis, and that means they should be far more frequent. “As a general rule,” Willis continues, basing her conclusions on decades of research, “concentrated study of 10 to 15 minutes for elementary school and 20 to 30 minutes for middle and high school students calls for a three- to five-minute break.” 

Read all about it: HERE

Impact of spatial training on math performance

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It was known from studies that spatial training improves math performance, but what in the spatial training exactly improved that math performance most. A new study revealed that:

age, use of concrete manipulatives, and type of transfer (“near” vs. “far”) moderated the effects of spatial training on mathematics. As the age of participants increased from 3 to 20 years, the effects of spatial training also increased in size. Spatial training paradigms that used concrete materials (e.g., manipulatives) were more effective than those that did not (e.g., computerized training). Larger transfer effects were observed for mathematics outcomes more closely aligned to the spatial training delivered compared to outcomes more distally related. None of the other variables examined (training dosage, spatial gains, posttest timing, type of control group, experimental design, publication status) moderated the effects

Read all about it: HERE

A new treatment for ADHD?

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Dyscalculia: News from the web:

The ADHD study, published in Nutrients, found that a prescribed amount of caffeine may increase the attention and retention of people with the disorder. They made this discovery through animal models, finding the substance “increases capacity and flexibility in both spatial attention and selective attention, as well as in working memory and short-term memory,” .

The results so far have been positive, although the team is aware that some of the other symptoms of ADHD like hyperactivity and impulsivity may be exaggerated by caffeine. More research is needed, with the team suggesting it may just be appropriate when the symptoms are purely attentional based and should only be administered under appropriate medical supervision.

Read all about it: HERE

Arithmetic learning in children: An fMRI training study

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Dyscalculia: News from the web:

This article is from the latest Neuropsychologia and describes how fMRI can show what changes in the brain when you learn arithmetic. At the start of learning you need a strategy to work out a multiplication for which we use areas in the prefrontal cortex and the Intraparietal Sulcus and gradually you can more and more retrieve the answers from memory and activate other areas. These changes can occur already after a few weeks of learning.  It happens that the changes in adults differ from the changes learning makes in the brain of children.

Read all about it: HERE