RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Comparison of Brain Activities by Academic Achievement and Cognitive Style According to Mathematical Representations – fNIRS Study
Sung-yoon Yoo1 , Doyeon Ahn2 , Kwang-Ho Lee3*
1Daejeon Donghwa Elementary School
2Chenan Cheongdang Elementary School
3Korea National University
Correspondence to paransol@knue.ac.kr
Brain, Digital, & Learning. Volume 12, Number 3, 523–540, September 2022. https://doi.org/10.31216/BDL.20220032
Received on September 5, 2022, Revised on September 16, 2022, Accepted on September 16, 2022, Published on September 30, 2022.
Copyright © 2022. Institute of Brain 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
The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyze fNIRS data according to mathematical representations of 6th grade elementary school students, and to obtain meaningful results in relation to mathematical representations by classifying them by academic achievement and cognitive style. The test is consisted of solving addition, subtraction of fractions using visual, verbal and numeric representation. Based on an achievement test and a cognitive style test, 36 students were classified into a high group and a low group by academic achievement, and into a visualizer group and a verbalizer group by cognitive style. Brain activity data were collected for each group. Regardless of academic achievement and cognitive style, students were most familiar with mathematical problems expressed in numerical representations. The students with low academic achievement showed more active prefrontal activity when solving mathematical problems of visual representation and verbal representation. The visual representation group showed significant activity in the prefrontal cortex when solving problems with visual representations. This study shows that various representations into numeric representations are needed to convert. It is effective to use more than one representation for students with low academic achievement.
Keywords
fNIRS, brain activity, the prefrontal cortex, visual presentation, verbal presentation, cognitive style, fraction, math achievement