Neuroscience study reveals new link between basic math skills and PSAT math success

January 4th, 2013 in Neuroscience /

In findings published today in The Journal of Neuroscience (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/1.abstract.pdf) research led by Daniel Ansari, Associate Professor in Western's Department of Psychology and a principal investigator at the Brain and Mind Institute, showed by utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on high school seniors that there was a significant link between their brain responses while solving extremely basic, single digit calculation problems and standard scores on the PSAT.

"The surprising thing here is that we found both a positive and negative relationship between during the very elementary, single digit arithmetic tasks and how well they did on the PSAT test, which measures advanced, high school level math skills," says Ansari, Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.


"Essentially, this means that those high school students that don't do so well on the PSAT use more problem solving strategies when they are doing very elementary sums and subtractions," offers Ansari. "If you are a high school student and you are using that we know are associated with fact retrieval and fluency, we see evidence that you are also going to score better on the math portion of the college admission test. There is a clear link between fluency and high level abilities – being fluent at basic math counts." 



Provided by University of Western Ontario

"Neuroscience study reveals new link between basic math skills and PSAT math success." January 4th, 2013. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-neuroscience-reveals-link-basic-math.html