Abstract
Background:
Extremely preterm (EP, <26 wk gestation) children have been observed to have poor academic achievement in comparison to their term-born peers, especially in mathematics. This study investigated potential underlying causes of this difficulty.
Methods:
A total of 219 EP participants were compared with 153 term-born control children at 11 y of age. All children were assessed by a psychologist on a battery of standardized cognitive tests and a number estimation test assessing children’s numerical representations.
Results:
EP children underperformed in all tests in comparison with the term controls (the majority of Ps < 0.001). Different underlying relationships between performance on the number estimation test and mathematical achievement were found in EP as compared with control children. That is, even after controlling for cognitive ability, a relationship between number representations and mathematical performance persisted for EP children only (EP: r = 0.346, n = 186, P < 0.001; control: r = 0.095, n = 146, P = 0.256).
Conclusion:
Interventions for EP children may target improving children’s numerical representations in order to subsequently remediate their mathematical skills.
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Acknowledgements
Summary data used in this paper have been published previously (3,9,14), but the analysis presented here takes a different approach to the data in order to more fully understand the specific difficulty that very preterm children have with mathematics, and to tease out factors that may contribute to the observed problems in mathematical processing for this group.
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Simms, V., Gilmore, C., Cragg, L. et al. Mathematics difficulties in extremely preterm children: evidence of a specific deficit in basic mathematics processing. Pediatr Res 73, 236–244 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/pr.2012.157
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/pr.2012.157
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