Poverty Negatively Affects Achievement
Young People Exposed to Stress Have Poor Memories
Apr 10, 2009
“Family income is a strong and consistent predictor of multiple indices of achievement, including standardized test scores, grades in school, and educational attainment.” So say Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg with the Departments of Design and Environmental Analysis and Human Development, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
The result of research they carried out was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 24, 2009.
Poverty Reduces Memory Capacity
Evans and Schamberg studied 195 white young people, equally divided between male and female. Half the group was raised in poverty, while the other half came from families with average American incomes.
Reporting on the study in The Globe and Mail on April 10, 2009, Marina Jimenez wrote: “Those who grew up in poor families could hold an average of 8.5 items, such as telephone numbers, in their memory, compared with 9.4 for those from middle-class backgrounds.” This is a 20% difference.
As Professor Evans points out, “This means poor children cannot learn as well as those from middle-class families.”
Stress Damages Brain Development
The researchers measured the amount of stress encountered by the young people from both groups. They measured this by looking at concentrations of three stress-related hormones, body-mass index, and allostatic load. (Allostatic load is the physiological wear and tear on the body that results from having to cope with stress).
The researchers discovered that the stress load was higher among the youth who came from households living below the poverty line. Middle-class kids had a lower stress load. Stress is known to have a negative impact on the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampus – two areas of the brain that are associated with working memory.
Poor Living Conditions
Professor Evans had previously studied the social conditions of the poor in 2004. He published the results of his work in the February-March 2004 issue of American Psychologist.
He found that poor people live in less desirable neighbourhoods. The children of poor families are therefore more likely to experience the social ills that accompany poverty, such as crime, crowded living conditions, and violence. They are also more likely to be exposed to noise and smoking.
Added to this, Prof. Evans reported that, “Poor children experience less social support, and their parents are less responsive and more authoritarian. Low-income children are read to relatively infrequently, watch more TV, and have less access to books and computers. Low-income parents are less involved in their children’s school activities. The air and water poor children consume are more polluted.”
All these things add to the stress load that youngsters experience. And, that stress is now established to have a negative impact on learning outcomes, condemning people from poor backgrounds to lower-income work.
As Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg have shown in their research, there is a biological basis to poverty.
