For many children, math feels like an impossible puzzle. Struggling to keep up, making careless mistakes, freezing under pressure.
For them, the inability to comprehend the dance between numbers can sometimes feel personal. But why are they not able to understand what’s happening?
The answer to that question may lie deep inside their brains, and may be far more nuanced than we think.
WHY DO CHILDREN STRUGGLE WITH NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS?
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that when given simple math problems, kids with math learning disabilities were less cautious about giving their answers and didn’t slow down after making errors.
That was not at all the case for children with typical math skills.
Crucially, these differences completely disappeared when the same children were shown dots representing quantities instead of Arabic number symbols.
The finding points to something researchers have long suspected.
The struggle for children with math learning disabilities is specifically tied to their ability to process symbols. Meaning, it has to do more with understanding quantities in general than with dealing with written numbers.
WHAT DID BRAIN SCANS DO?
MRI data showed that the lack of caution in kids with math learning disabilities was linked to lower activity in the middle frontal gyrus.
The middle frontal gyrus is a brain region associated with processing numbers, focus, impulse control, and adapting to new situations.
Furthermore, not slowing down after errors was linked to lower activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain involved in detecting mistakes and monitoring performance.
When children were tested with dots instead of number symbols, those differences in brain activity disappeared entirely. In other words, kids with math learning disabilities showed the same level of activity in both regions as their peers.
SHOULD MATHS BE TAUGHT DIFFERENTLY?
The research suggests that math difficulty isn’t explained by one single math region in the brain failing to function. Instead, brain areas responsible for processing information and catching errors appear to be central to the problem.
This opens a new door for how educators and specialists might support struggling children.
Researchers that led the study believe future interventions could involve teaching kids to actively think about how they are solving problems, as well as introducing them to different problem-solving strategies. This could essentially mean training both the thinking and the self-monitoring that the study found to be underdeveloped.
The research was conducted with second and third grade children and used a detailed mathematical analysis to detect subtle patterns in how they approached tasks.
The study’s focus was not just on whether the children got the answers right, but how they behaved throughout. The goal was to understand not just performance, but how kids with and without math learning disabilities approach problems differently.
