Presenter: Martha S. Burns, Ph.D. Length: Extract 8 minutes (total 60 minutes)
Several new studies have shown that students from families below the poverty line are at the greatest risk for academic failure. Research reveals that low family income has a bigger impact on academics than ethnicity or English language proficiency. In this extract Dr. Martha Burns reviews the newest research and provides research on how the Fast ForWord intervention has been found to have a significant impact on academic achievement in children of poverty.
A famous 1995 study by Hart and Risley demonstrated that by the age of four, children from poor households hear 32 million fewer spoken words than their better-off peers. More recent research has shown that quality of conversation differs as well. Parents with higher education and income are more likely to engage children with questions and dialogue that invite creative responses, while parents in poverty often lack the time and energy for anything more than simple and goal-oriented commands.
The 32 Million Word Gap – Cognitive Functions – The Negative Impact of Stress – Hart and Risley Research
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Effects of Poverty on School Success
Key Points
- Children of poverty are exposed to millions of fewer words before they enter school.
- Income level negatively impacts the ability to learn specific cognitive skills.
- Cognitive skills like memory and attention are really affected by poverty.
- Poverty is associated with chronic stress
- Children who are English language learners have a double jeopardy
- Neuroscience, computer games that target the skills impacted by poverty in ways that teachers can’t in a classroom.
3 PARTS of the BRAIN MOST EFFECTED BY POVERTY
First and foremost the language areas of the brain were not as well developed. Secondly the reading area of the brain that’s the purple regions entired to the language area were not as well developed and the surface area wasn’t as large.
Executive functions which is your ability to have self control to listen on demand, to remember everything that is going on around you, those aren’t as well developed.
And visual spatial skills aren’t as well developed. So it’s not that the brains aren’t as smart, it’s not as though the children’s brain are not developing, they are developing. But, they are not developing in areas that are important for learning in school.
TRANSCRIPTION
Effects of Poverty on School Success
Key Points
- Children of poverty number one you may know this from the Hart and Risley researchers are exposed to millions of fewer words, they are actually about 32 million fewer words before they enter school.
- That income level does negatively impact the ability to learn specific cognitive skills.
- Cognitive skills like memory and attention are really affected by poverty.
- Poverty is associated with chronic stress and again if you read Eric Jensen book or if you are aware of it “teaching with poverty in mind”, he talks a lot about the impact of poverty on learning but also how poverty is associated with stress and the negative impact of stress and I will show you that research too.
- We will talk about how many children who are English language learners have a double jeopardy or even triple jeopardy – they do have poverty, high poverty rates often times as well as learning the second language in school.
Finally, we are going to talk about the use of computer based activities – neuroscience, computer games that target the skills impacted by poverty in ways that teachers can’t in a classroom. So you can augment what the teacher does.
HART and RISLEY
Let’s just begin with the Hart and Risley research, it was published in the 1990’s as you know and the book was language experiences of young children and this is a graph that simply shows you, along the horizontal axis you see we are looking at an age up to 48months. So we are looking at children from birth to 48 months and how much talking goes on in a home. If a child comes from your home, you are a professional, then that child is exposed to well over 40 million words. But if a child comes from a home below the poverty line, in the first 4 years of life, they are only exposed to 13 million words. That is a huge gap. That is over 30 million fewer words that the child hears before they enter school. Now the problem with that is that the brain is an experience dependent organ. So if the child is coming into school with fewer experiences with language, then the language skills are obvious are affected. Their oral language skills.
HIRSCH
We know that research by Hirsch that you see in this slide, shows that when children enter kindergarten with low oral language skills the gap widens. That is largely because when there are sitting in a classroom a lot of what the teacher is saying is going over their head. They are just not hearing it, they are not paying attention to it or they are tuning out a lot because they’re listening is not their strength, they don’t have a brain that is good at language yet and so they are not benefiting the way the students who have good language skills are from classroom instruction and hence their vocabulary gap just continues to get wider.
KIMBERLEY NOBLE
Let’s look at the impact of poverty on other skills besides language. We know from research that was done about 10 years ago by Kimberly Noble, that when children are below the poverty line, they also have in addition to language – that big brown line that you see on the line graph/bar graph, but there are also problems with working memory and they have problems with cognitive control. I want to explain these briefly.
Working memory – you may know well, but that is your ability to hold information in mind. So it is your ability right now because you are having to listen to me to remember what I said five minutes ago and to hold on to what I am saying now and keep it in mind as we progress through this session today.
Cognitive control – is the ability to pay attention to what I am saying and to not tune-out, and to listen on demand and also other kinds of self control. But, listening on demand, being able to sit in a classroom, being able to say to yourself that I am going to pay attention, I am going to ignore the other things going on around me. Those are severely affected by poverty. We have known that for over 10 years. But now in the last few years we have even newer research.
Just this last year, Kimberly Noble published another study where she looked at the thickness of the cortex. The thickness of the human brain, the outside crust of the human brain, where all the little dendrites are that connect up with other neurons and the cell bodies and that thickness of the cortex is a rough measure of what you are good at. For example, if you are a very good artist, you would have a very thick visual cortex, if you are a musician you would have a very thick cortex on the right auditory regions of your brain. So thickness of the cortex kind of tells you how much experience you have had in something and also to some extend, how good you are, and so what she found when she looked at this measures of the cortex, a new kind of technology that is available – that small differences in income were associated with very large differences in surface brain area, and that children from higher income family, children from your family and my family and Donald Trump’s family really have very little differences in our brain. So once you get above the poverty line, well stuff doesn’t seem to affect this cortical surface, but among children of poverty, it does.
PARTS OF THE BRAIN AFFECTED BY POVERTY
Let’s look at the specific structures that Noble found were affected of the parts of the brain that were affected by poverty.
First and foremost the language areas of the brain were not as well developed. Secondly the reading area of the brain that’s the purple regions entired to the language area were not as well developed and the surface area wasn’t as large.
Executive functions which is your ability to have self control to listen on demand, to remember everything that is going on around you, those aren’t as well developed.
And visual spatial skills aren’t as well developed. So it’s not that the brains aren’t as smart, it’s not as though the children’s brain are not developing, they are developing. But, they are not developing in areas that are important for learning in school.
Noble concluded that:
The research implies that income relates most strongly to brain structure among the very most disadvantaged student.
JOHN GABRIELLI
Later in April 2015 (last year) Dr John Gabrielli, he is at MIT and has been working at Scans of dyslexia and all sorts of different developmental differences.
Published research that corroborates what Noble showed. He showed, that high income, verses low income achievement differences directly correlate with cortical thickness in adolescent. So he was looking even beyond just the young children, that Noble was looking at, and looking at the parts of the brain that are affected most by income level, and these are the regions of the brain that you see on this slide, that are so important for school. But they are not important, that is interesting for things like sports and I will explain that later.
The parts of the brain that you need to be good at sports are different kind of skills and those are not affected by poverty, which I find very interesting.
POLLAK
Pollak also published research in June of 2015, that continue to corroborate this research showing a 20 percent gap in test scores between poor children and middle class children seems to be related to the brain development in these specific parts of the brain that are important for learning (frontal and temporal lobes)
Please Send Me the Slides for the Effect of Poverty on School Success Webinar