Parenting and Special Education Research Unit, KU Leuven, Belgium.
Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium.
Dev Sci. 2024 Nov;27(6):e13557. doi: 10.1111/desc.13557. Epub 2024 Aug 12.
Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever way to (quasi-)experimentally address this issue is the longitudinal school cut-off design, which compares children who are similar in age but differ in schooling (because they are born right before or after the cut-off date for school entry). We used for the first time such a longitudinal school cut-off design to experimentally investigate the effect of schooling on children's white matter networks. We compared "young" first graders (schooling group, n = 34; M = 68 months; 20 girls) and "old" preschoolers (non-schooling group, n = 33; M = 66 months; 18 girls) that were similar in age but differed in the amount of formal instruction they received. Our study revealed that changes in fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity in five a priori selected white matter tracts during the transition from preschool to primary school were predominantly driven by age-related maturation. We did not find specific schooling effects on white matter, despite their strong presence for early reading and early arithmetic skills. The present study is the first to disentangle the effects of age-related maturation and schooling on white matter within a longitudinal cohort of 5-year-old preschoolers. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: White matter tracts that have been associated with reading and arithmetic may be susceptible to experience-dependent neuroplasticity when children learn to read and calculate. This longitudinal study used the school cut-off design to isolate schooling-induced from coinciding maturational influences on children's white matter development. White matter changes during the transition from preschool to primary school are predominantly driven by age-related maturation and not by schooling effects. Strong effects of schooling on behavior were shown for early reading and early arithmetic, but not for verbal ability and spatial ability.
儿童的白质发育受经验驱动，但人们对其如何受正规教育的影响知之甚少。少数研究比较了开始接受正规学校教育前后的儿童，以了解这一点，但这些研究不能将成熟效应与与学校教育相关的效应分开。一种巧妙的（准）实验方法是纵向学校截止设计，该设计比较了在年龄上相似但在学校教育上存在差异的儿童（因为他们出生在入学截止日期之前或之后）。我们首次使用这种纵向学校截止设计来实验性地研究学校教育对儿童白质网络的影响。我们比较了“年轻”的一年级学生（受教育组，n=34；M=68 个月；20 名女孩）和“年长”的学龄前儿童（未受教育组，n=33；M=66 个月；18 名女孩），他们的年龄相似，但接受的正规教育数量不同。我们的研究表明，从幼儿园到小学过渡期间，五个预先选定的白质束中的分数各向异性和平均弥散度的变化主要是由与年龄相关的成熟驱动的。尽管阅读和早期算术技能有明显的学校教育效应，但我们并未发现白质的特定学校教育效应。本研究首次在一个 5 岁学龄前儿童的纵向队列中分离出与年龄相关的成熟和学校教育对白质的影响。研究亮点：与阅读和算术相关的白质束在儿童学习阅读和计算时可能容易受到经验依赖性神经可塑性的影响。这项纵向研究使用学校截止设计来分离学校教育引起的和与儿童白质发展同时发生的成熟影响。从幼儿园到小学的过渡期间，白质的变化主要由与年龄相关的成熟驱动，而不是由学校教育的影响驱动。学校教育对早期阅读和早期算术的行为有强烈影响，但对言语能力和空间能力没有影响。
