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[quote=Anonymous]This is from the above article.  This is very, very interesting information that helps us understand the "achievement gap" and why it persists.

[quote]Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly
1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.

The region of the brain in question handles language, memory, spatial skills and reasoning, all important to success in school and beyond.

The study, published last month in Nature Neuroscience, is the largest of its kind to date. It was led by Kimberly Noble, who teaches at both Columbia University’s Teachers College and the university’s medical school. Elizabeth Sowell, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, was the senior author.

“We’ve known for so long that poverty and lack of access to resources to enrich the developmental environment are related to poor school performance, poor test scores and fewer educational opportunities,” Sowell said. “But now we can really tie it to a physical thing in the brain. We realized that this is a big deal.”

The study is part of a new and growing body of research on children’s brain structures that has been made possible by technological advances in magnetic resonance imaging.

“It’s only been in the past
20 years that we could have done this with living, developing children,” said Sowell, who published a pioneering 1999 study that found the brain is still developing past adolescence, contrary to earlier beliefs that brain growth was complete by the teen years.

The research comes at a time when a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families and the academic achievement gap between poor and more-affluent children is growing. Policymakers are increasingly concerned about ways to reduce the gap, which is apparent as early as kindergarten.

In another study that has been accepted for publication in Psychological Science, a team led by neuroscientist John Gabrieli of MIT found differences in the brain’s cortical thickness between low-income and higher-income teenagers. The study linked that difference for the first time to standardized test scores: Fifty-seven percent of the poor children scored proficient in math and reading tests given annually in Massachusetts, compared with 91 percent of the higher-income students.

“The thing that really stands out is how powerful the economic influences are on something as fundamental as brain structure,” Gabrieli said. “It’s just very striking.”[/quote][/quote]

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