RESEARCH ARTICLE
Changes of child’s brain activity and functional connectivity in transformational geometry program: An fNIRS study
Korea National University of Education
Correspondence to Ming-Jung Kang, ice9562kr@naver.com
Brain, Digital, & Learning. Volume 11, Number 2, 199‒213, June 2021. https://doi.org/10.31216/BDL.20210013
Received on May 24, 2021, Revised on June 4, 2021, Accepted on June 7, 2021, Published on June 30, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 Institute of Brain·AI based Education, Korea National University of Education. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
This study was analyzed whether children’s transformation geometry ability can be developed through educational programs using tangram, and how the brain was activated and changed in the process. The subjects of this study are 20 first-year elementary school students, a single group pre test-post test experimental research design was employed. There are three types of transformational geometry tasks: house as a translation, square as a rotation, swan as a reflection. The research results are as follows. First, the difference in the accuracy rate according to the pre and post-test was significant in house and square. Second, DLPFC was activated in all three tasks as a result of analyzing the difference between the brain active regions before and after the program in solving translation, rotation, and reflection tasks. In square task, VLPFC were significantly activated and in the task, FPPFC were significantly activated along with the activation of DLPFC. Third, the functional connectivity of brain activity in pre and post tasks was analyzed. In the pre test, only channel 6(R) in the DLPFC region and channel 10(R) in the VLPFC region showed a connectivity of .834. In the post task, channel 12(R) showed functional connectivity with DLPFC, OFC, and VLPFC, and functional connectivity of the brain was found only in the right hemisphere. However, in the post task, there was a significant functional connection between the left and right hemispheres.
Keywords
Transformational geometric, tangram, fNIRS, child