One of the push backs from teachers against Common Core, (which tries to teach 3 grade levels above what is currently being taught each class), is that children’s brains are not ready at younger ages for complicated math analysis.  To this corporate executives say baloney and for that solo reason, we are teaching complex mathematics to kindergärtners today, who should be learning basic numbers. Teachers report that this concept is not working. We now have research showing teachers do indeed know that they are talking about……

“In the study, 28 children solved simple math problems while receiving two functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans; the scans were done about 1.2 years apart. The researchers also scanned 20 adolescents and 20 adults at a single time point. At the start of the study, the children were ages 7-9. The adolescents were 14-17 and the adults were 19-22.“

“During the study, as the children aged from an average of 8.2 to 9.4 years, they became faster and more accurate at solving math problems, and relied more on retrieving math facts from memory and less on counting….”

(This is the opposite of Common Core which wants one to figure out every problem from scratch by drawing pictures of circles with toggles in them, to show one understands math “concepts”.  If you do a problem in your head as above, you lose points )

“As these shifts in strategy took place, the researchers saw several changes in the children’s brains. The hippocampus, a region with many roles in shaping new memories, was activated more in children’s brains after one year. Regions involved in counting, including parts of the prefrontal and parietal cortex, were activated less.”

(What this means is that by continuing Common Core policies, children are reusing the parts of their brain which are designed to be breaking down and being inactivated. If they do a common core problem one day, the brain eliminates that neuron the next.  It is worthless endeavor.  Likewise, the hippocampus which at that time is growing, is not getting any mathematical data to pocket as being memorized.  It is an opportunity lost.)

“The scientists also saw changes in the degree to which the hippocampus was connected to other parts of children’s brains, with several parts of the prefrontal, anterior temporal cortex and parietal cortex more strongly connected to the hippocampus after one year. Crucially, the stronger these connections, the greater was each individual child’s ability to retrieve math facts from memory, a finding that suggests a starting point for future studies of math-learning…”

This is proof that Common Core is making children dumber. Something all experts have been stating.

“Although children were using their hippocampus more after a year, adolescents and adults made minimal use of their hippocampus while solving math problems. Instead, they pulled math facts from well-developed information stores in the neocortex.”

Which is exactly what Common Core does not do: put math facts into the neocortex!

“What this means is that the hippocampus is providing a scaffold for learning and consolidating facts into long-term memory in children,” said Menon, who is also the Rachel L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor at the medical school of Stanford. Children’s brains are building a schema for mathematical knowledge. The hippocampus helps support other parts of the brain as adultlike neural connections for solving math problems are being constructed. “In adults this scaffold is not needed because memory for math facts has most likely been consolidated into the neocortex,” he said. Interestingly, the research also showed that, although the adult hippocampus is not as strongly engaged as in children, it seems to keep a backup copy of the math information that adults usually draw from the neocortex.”

If one doesn’t take the proper designated time between each of these learning steps, this process is interrupted. Teaching 3rd Graders Sines , Tangents and Cosines before their multiplicative skills have been locked in their neocortex is fruitless.  Yet that is exactly what Common Core does.  Pushes 3 higher grade-levels down hard on students still struggling with the basics.

“The brain’s activity patterns were more stable in adolescents and adults than in children, suggesting that as the brain gets better at solving math problems its activity becomes more consistent.”

What happened in the whole Common Core formation process was that David Coleman designed Common Core on his processes of thinking, ones that adults and adolescents use to learn. At the time, having no children himself, he was completely ignorant that children use completely different parts of the brain to learn ….

Common Core, as every early-childhood teacher has said, does not work on young children…  We now have the brain scans to prove it.

Save Common Core rigor for college, where it belongs.  Through these brain scans, those supporting arguments for Common Core just got bumped from science,… over to myth…..

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