The brains of around 70,000 children starting primary school on 1 September will have changed by the end of the school year, with formal lessons in reading and maths directly shaping their development, according to researchers at KU Leuven.
The findings come from a study by neuropedagogues at LIVO, the university’s Institute for Educational Research, which found that learning in the classroom affects young children’s brains after just one year.
Researchers compared two groups of children of a similar age using a series of cognitive tests and MRI brain scans.
One group, made up of children born at the end of the year, had completed their first year of primary school. The other group, born in the first months of the following year, had remained in nursery education for an extra year.
This allowed the researchers to separate the effects of schooling from the normal maturation of the brain, said Floor Vandecruys, a postdoctoral researcher in family and special needs education.
Among children who had completed the first year of primary school, the team found clear changes in both brain activity and brain structure.
A year of formal education made the brain more responsive to words and numbers, the researchers said. The effect was stronger for reading than for maths, and the difference between the two groups was also more marked in reading.
The researchers said the impact of what children are taught in class on brain function should not be underestimated.
“We have known for a long time that young brains are highly plastic, but this study shows objectively for the first time that our brains change when we learn new things,” said Bert De Smedt, professor of neuropedagogy at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences.
He said children can already learn a great deal at nursery age, but that development does not happen by itself. Classroom learning activities, he said, help steer how the brain develops.
The study also found that specific brain regions change through learning, although those changes are not equally large in every child.
The scientists now plan to investigate those differences further.
“Now that we know which brain regions change when young children learn to read and do maths, we can continue to examine the roots of learning difficulties such as dyslexia and dyscalculia,” Vandecruys and De Smedt said.
In follow-up research, they will focus on children at greater risk of learning difficulties and study whether the plasticity of specific brain regions plays a role.
They hope this will eventually make it possible to detect learning difficulties earlier and provide better support for children who struggle more with reading and maths.
