Differences Between Achievement Gap Between Poverty And Brain Development

According to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, growing up poor can harm brain growth and lead to lower performance in school. The fact that children belonging to low-income families have poorer performance in school has been known for a while, but recent research shows that poverty can be linked to a smaller surface area of the brain. Twenty percent of the achievement gap between affluent and poor children can be explained by their differences in brain development. A psychologist, Seth Pollak, and others at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used the results of 389 healthy children, ages 4 to 22, on academic achievement tests and compared them with tissue volume of the brain. The tissue volume in the children’s temporal lobes, frontal