| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 7, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | December 2, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1734735 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Gregg Solomon
gesolomo@nsf.gov (703)292-8333 DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | November 30, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $966,253.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $982,661.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $16,408.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
4200 FIFTH AVENUE PITTSBURGH PA US 15260-0001 (412)624-7400 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
PA US 15213-2303 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
ECR-EDU Core Research, IntgStrat Undst Neurl&Cogn Sys |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001718DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001819DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This project, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, will address the need to improve math abilities in American children and adults. According to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 40% of 4th graders, and 33% of 8th graders score at, or above, proficiency level in math, and only about 30% of US adults can complete basic mathematical processes in real-world scenarios such as looking at a thermometer and figuring out the temperature. Such poor math achievement outcomes impose significant burdens, such as in securing employment, on individuals who enter adulthood without achieving basic proficiency, and challenges the capacity of the US to remain competitive in a global economy that is strongly driven by the intellectual capital of its citizens. This project will investigate a foundational skill that underlies math achievement: the ability to recognize visual number symbols by connecting them with the quantities they represent. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral measures, the project team will characterize the neural constituents of number knowledge and will test for pathways within this number network that contribute to this "symbolic integration" and math ability. Finally, by studying adults and 8-year-old children, they will test whether the neural substrates of symbolic integration change with age, and if so, whether these changes correspond to shifts in the behavioral profile of symbolic integration and individual difference in math ability. Overall, by focusing on the widely used, but poorly understood, construct of symbolic integration, the proposed work will have broad impact on theories of math ability that make assumptions about these underlying processes and will inform future studies examining math learning trajectories and remediation strategies for struggling math learners. This project is funded by Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems (NSF-NCS), a multidisciplinary program jointly supported by the Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE).
The overarching objective of the project is to investigate whether symbolic integration is foundational to math ability in adults and children. The project leverages the larger and more established literature on word recognition to develop and test a symbolic integration hypothesis of number processing. This model posits that formal math ability rests in part upon the integration of visual symbols (i.e., Arabic numerals) with the magnitudes they represent, via both direct (visual-semantic) and indirect (visual-verbal, visual-manual) pathways. An innovative combination of neurobehavioral measures will be used to test the model, through an individual differences study involving 100 adults and 125 8-year-old children. The project team will develop a novel neuroimaging protocol and will use cutting-edge multivariate methods to efficiently and broadly identify and characterize the neural constituents of a number processing network. A likely set of regions includes those involved in visual (fusiform gyrus), verbal (angular gyrus), manual (precental gyrus), and semantic (inferior parietal cortex) coding of number. In addition, resting state data will be acquired from each participant, and used to extract a metric of connectivity between identified visual, verbal, manual, and semantic constituents of number knowledge. A pair of behavioral tasks will measure the associative strength between visual and semantic codes for number (i.e., symbolic integration) in each participant. Using general linear models (GLM), the investigators will then test the prediction that both direct (visual-semantic) and mediated (visual-verbal-semantic; visual-manual-semantic) pathways significantly contribute to symbolic integration skill. Finally, standardized measures of math ability will be obtained from each participant. A GLM will be used to test for a predicted positive relation between individual differences in symbolic integration and math ability. Overall, the work will have a broad impact on theories of math ability and will inform future studies of math learning and intervention.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The overarching objective of the project was to investigate whether symbolic integration is foundational to math ability in adults and children. Symbolic integration refers to the ability to recognize visual number symbols by connecting them with the quantities they represent. By combining behavioral and advanced neuroimaging approaches, we discovered a complex and nuanced picture regarding the importance of symbolic integration across development. We first showed that it is critical to measure symbolic integration by considering the quantities that individual participants perceived rather than the veridical quantities (Liu et al, 2018). Using this information as a foundation, we measured symbolic integration behaviorally during a number comparison task as well as a number-letter identification task that did not require participants to process the numerical meaning of the number symbols. At the neural level, we measured symbolic integration via connectivity between brain regions with different levels of involvement in number processing. Unlike other studies that we reviewed in the literature, we considered a much broader network of brain regions to account for their potential role in participants’ math abilities (Ren & Libertus, 2023). Counter to our expectations, we found that less symbolic integration during the behavioral number comparison task was associated with better math abilities in adults. While we found behavioral evidence of symbolic integration in the number-letter identification task, individual differences in adults’ level of integration were not correlated with their math abilities (Ren et al., 2022). Interestingly, 9-year-old children showed the same effects of symbolic integration on the behavioral two tasks as adults, but individual differences in children’s level of integration were never correlated with their math abilities (Ren et al., in prep). In contrast, integration at the neural level, specifically functional connectivity between visual processing areas, was positively correlated with adults’ math (and reading) abilities suggesting that greater symbolic integration at the neural level is associated with better math (and reading) skills in adults (Ren et al., in prep). For children, however, we found that functional connectivity between occipito-parietal brain areas was negatively associated with their math (and reading) abilities (Ren et al., in prep). Collectively, these findings suggest that symbolic integration is a multi-faceted construct and its role for math abilities (and possibly other cognitive skills) may be context dependent. Importantly, the role of symbolic integration for math seems to differ for children and adults. These findings will inform future studies examining math learning trajectories and remediation strategies for struggling math learners in middle childhood and adulthood.
Last Modified: 03/28/2024
Modified by: Melissa E Libertus
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