Psychologist explores reading comprehension and math disabilities in children with spina bifida
BY RACHELLE COOPER
Prof. Marcia Barnes, Psychology, says that contrary to the common belief that problems with arithmetic among children with spina bifida are related to visual/spatial skills, she has found that the two seem unrelated.
“Visual-spatial difficulties are actually related to other aspects of math, such as geometry and word problem-solving,” she says.
After spending 11 years as a psychologist and researcher, Barnes arrived on campus July 1 and holds an internal University Research Chair position. Her research into the math difficulties of children with spina bifida was prompted seven years ago when she was working at the Hospital for Sick Children as a clinician-scientist and researcher and came across a problem she couldn't find the answer to.
Her research at the time focused on reading comprehension in children with neurological afflictions, primarily spina bifida. She used that research to help parents cope with their children's reading problems, but was stymied when a set of parents asked how to deal with their child's problems in math.
“How was I going to inform parents whose children were struggling with math if we didn't have good research that says this is where the problems are coming from and this is what to do about them?” she says.
Because about 40 per cent of children with spina bifida are diagnosed with math disabilities by the early elementary grades, Barnes says following them from an early age allows her to look for the developmental precursors of later math difficulties.
She and her colleagues have been observing a group of children with spina bifida and typically developing children since the age of six months. The children are now five, and Barnes will follow their development until they reach Grade 4.
“One thing we're looking at is whether or not children who have some difficulties in using their fingers to count will have problems later in using their fingers to perform calculations such as adding,” she says. “This research will help with early identification and early intervention.”
This is only one of Barnes' current research projects. In another study, she is co-ordinating the neuropsychology part of a multinational clinical trial. The trial aims to determine if moderate hypothermia treatment improves cognitive outcomes in children with severe head injuries. The study is a collaboration of critical-care physicians, neuropsychologists and neurosurgeons at all children's trauma centres in Canada and some in England and France. More than 200 children are taking part in the study, which began four years ago.
“There are some animal studies and studies of severely injured adults suggesting that hypothermia may be protective because it might affect secondary injury to the brain such as brain swelling,” says Barnes. “The last children have just been recruited into the study, and the data collection will be finished in a year.”
In another head injury study, she examined how an accident at different points in a child's brain development can affect the acquisition of reading skills.
“There's a popular idea that the younger you are when you have a brain injury, the better off you are,” she says. “Although this is true for some types of brain injury and for the development of some skills, we have found the opposite can also be true. If you have a diffuse brain injury before you've learned a skill or while you're in the rapid phase of learning, it might actually be worse for you.”
In this study, which was published in the journal Developmental Neuropsychology, Barnes used the acquisition of reading to determine how a child's cognitive development was affected by an injury.
“We found that in a child who has not yet learned how to read or is just starting to learn, a traumatic brain injury disrupts the acquisition of reading, whereas children who are injured after they've started to learn how to read don't lose their ability to read.”
Barnes has also just started a study looking at what reading and language factors contribute to reading comprehension in English- and French- speaking children in Ontario and Quebec.
“The assumption is often that if kids can learn how to read the words, then they use their general language skills to understand what the text means, but this is not always the case,” she says.
Barnes notes that we have much less understanding of how reading comprehension develops than we have about how the ability to read words develops.
“Even kids who are fast readers and have very good word-decoding skills can have problems in comprehension,” she says. “Even when they know what the words mean, they can have problems integrating their general knowledge with text.”
The Ontario Grade 10 literary test results show that many students have problems with this aspect of comprehension, she adds.
“Many Grade 10 students had difficulty mobilizing their own knowledge to understand the meaning of a text and to learn from that text.”
Studying the factors that affect how English- and French-speaking children understand narrative, social science and science texts at different grades will allow Barnes to determine what factors in development are important for children to be able to understand what they read.
