Less gray matter in key areas of the brain could account for as much as 20 percent of the achievement gap between children living in poverty and those who are not, according to a newstudy.
The results of brain scans of 389 typically developing children, ages 4 to 22, showed that children whose family income was below the federal poverty line were the most adversely affected. They had less gray matter, which processes information in the brain. Brains of “near-poor” children in families whose income was 1.5 times the poverty threshold also showed significant structural differences from the brains of children in higher-income families, though those differences were not as extreme. In 2015, a family of four with an income below $24,250 is considered living in poverty.
The study did not determine why living in poverty impedes the natural maturation of the brain, said lead author Nicole L. Hair, a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Although some research has pointed to caregiver interactions and stress in low-income families as reasons for the achievement gap, Hair said more research needs to be done about which poverty-related factors have the biggest impact on brain development.
[For more of this story, written by Susan Frey, go to http://edsource.org/2015/study...ic-achievement/84181]
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