Abstract
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is a resultant condition in children born to drinking women during their gestation period. The state inevitably leads to brain damage and deters proper child growth. The problems resulting from FAS vary from one child to another, and these defects are sadly irreversible. Children with FAS experience learning, vision, hearing, memory, and attention span challenges. This explains why most of these children generally have difficulty at school. A particular area of weakness for children with FAS is their deficiency in mathematical skills and poor ignition of mathematical information relayed to them. Studies and experiments reveal an apparent flaw in the mathematical cognition of individuals faced with intrauterine alcohol exposure. They display little If no recognition of erroneous calculations but perform better in other disciplines. These individuals are capable of performing better, especially in mathematics, given proper attention. These children’s academic success relies on teachers’ and parents’ capacity to understand these children and accommodate them accordingly.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is a resultant condition in children born to drinking women during pregnancy. FAS constitutes the extreme case of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) spectrum.FASDs are all conditions that result from a mother drinking during the gestation period. FAS causes problems in the nervous system, growth problems, and minor alterations in facial features. Children born with FAS experience problems with attention span, communication, learning, vision, and memory. Victims have challenges learning and have trouble trying to get along with other people.
One specific area of interest is the challenges children with FAS face when learning mathematics. The children display evident deficits, especially in those moderate, possibly confounding variables and IQ. FASD conditions are mostly exposed to various mathematical components, including specific tests and standardized achievement measures. The condition occurs in children, adults, and adolescents. FAS’s outstanding character is that it causes difficulty in mathematical skills compared to other cognitive areas. The rate of mathematical cognition is directly proportional to the quantity of intrauterine alcohol exposure. New studies are aligned with investigating the co-relationship between white brain matter and understanding mathematics for FAS victims. One such study employed Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) to determine the relationship between white matter structure and mathematical skills. The outcome revealed that the varietal area important in performing mathematical tasks, which is damaged due to prenatal alcohol intake, causes the discipline’s challenges.
The patient lobes also called the association cortex, provide a site for advanced thinking processes, various aspects of sensory information processing, including auditory and visual data, and cognitive processes (Cleversay, 2018). Processing of mathematical information is dependent on several skills such as spatial or visual skills, executive functioning, and the corpus callosum that facilitates the integration of facts in the two brain hemispheres. Past research has also revealed that mathematical processing is related to particular sections of the parietal lobes. However, various areas are seemingly related to diverse processes, including subtraction, addition, and other complex types of mathematics interconnected in a network. The findings expose a link between cognition and the brain’s structure, which gives an insight into how the brain of a victim of FAS works. The results also facilitate understanding of how mathematical processes occur for the more significant population, similar to past studies. Ultimately, an improved version of the inherent cause of the different cognitive deficits in the broader FASD may lead to a better quality of life and improved treatment.
The probability of FAS individuals’ academic success and general success can be increased if caregivers and educational service providers are more aware of its complexities. A study was carried out whose primary purpose was to identify services provided by caregivers of individuals with FAS disorder (Cleversay, 2018). The study aimed to determine whether these caregivers could assure the success of these individuals in schools. A sample group of sixteen caregivers was chosen to represent the enormous population in telephone interviews. The telephone interviews included a question, “What services would help youth be successful in school?” An efficient concept mapping technique was utilized where the individual participants grouped the answers provided. The grouped data were subjected to a critical analysis using the cluster analysis method, and in some cases, multidimensional scaling was employed. Six concepts surfaced from the question, including active participation in the child’s education, better accommodation, and provision of relevant resources, ensuring that educators are vast with knowledge about FASD, more receptive educators who are willing to listen to these individuals, a highly supportive knowledge base, and more understanding and support from the child’s parents and family members (Cleverday, 2018).
A second study was carried out whose study domain was the academic achievement of individuals consistent with prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE). The detection of errors, a vital arithmetic quality, can be evaluated in a mathematical verification undertaking (Ben-Shachar, 2020). Electroencephalographic (EEG) studies employing these undertakings have exposed outbursts of the-band behavior that happen uniformly in reaction to perceived errors. The behavior was monitored for individuals with intrauterine alcohol exposure and the typically developing matched controls. One would predict that the group exposed to intrauterine alcohol intake would display lesser outbursts in this experiment in the case of detection of an error and reduced responses depending on the magnitude of the error intensity.
The respondent’s mothers were also involved in this study, where they were questioned about the quantity and frequency of alcohol intake during pregnancy. The participant’s cases were followed up from birth to when they were diagnosed with FAS or partial FAS by a dysmorphologist. EEGs were apparent for forty-eight adolescents during a task that aimed to verify their conditions. The study required to separate incorrect solutions from the correct solutions to easy equations where wrong answers contained huge or tiny deviations from the right answers.
The results obtained included excellent performance from the control group, while the PAE group exhibited poor performance. The accuracy of the answers was inversely proportional to the severity of the diagnosis. The control group and the heavily exposed individuals showed the expected differentiation. The control group had higher theta-bursts in reaction to erroneous values, while the PAE group had lower theta-bursts. The extent of brain impairment due to prenatal alcohol exposure caused the PAE group’s poor response to errors. The lesser the reaction, the higher the severity of their diagnoses. The highly exposed individuals displayed a deficient level of discrepancy and only showed a response to significant errors. The experiment revealed that PAE favorably alters theta activities related to arithmetic error detection. The method can be used to separate exposed individuals and those individuals who have not been disclosed and within a diagnostic category, encouraging the utilization of quantitative and number related process patterns to obtain a neurocognitive profile that can potentially alleviate the process of diagnosis and overall treatment of FAS disorders (Ben-Shachar, 2020).
A final study evaluated children’s academic achievement with a severe case of prenatal alcohol exposure (Glass, 2017). The study was carried out to determine these individuals’ possible weaknesses and strengths. The study also investigated the utility of various definitions for distinguishing poor performance in academic work and to venture scholarly output. The method employed included a sample group of children aged between eight and sixteen years. The children were evaluated by utilizing WIAT-II. Their performance patterns were assessed in two separate subject categories. The two categories included those children who had experienced severe exposure to prenatal alcohol exposure were sixty-seven in number, and sixty-one controls were employed. A recurrent-measures examining group variations domain was carried out, including spelling, math, and reading. Children’s percentages and numbers were taken down for analysis (Glass, 2017). FreeSurfer v5.3 was used to analyze the obtained data and performance where the neutral correlates were evaluated. The results revealed that the individuals exposed to alcohol performed worse than the control samples. This was the case for all domains, including numbers. The alcohol-exposed group particularly experiences challenges in carrying out numerical operations. More than half of them displayed low achievement in all academic fields. The percentage and number of children achieving good marks was variant from group to group and from discipline to discipline. The imaging analysis revealed that the individuals exposed to prenatal alcohol were better at some fields, such as spelling than numbers. There was no positive correlation between the individuals’ performance and the various disciplines for the control group. In contrast, the individuals with FAS disorder showed a positive correlation between their performance and the type of field where numbers were the most significant challenge (Glass, 2017).
Conclusion
Mathematics is particularly a challenging field for individuals with FAS disorder. They are naturally characterized by a low cognition of mathematical errors but perform better in other disciplines. However, they can achieve more in their education and life with proper assistance. Educational services may assist individuals living with FAS disorders by providing the requirements for their academic success and general success in other fields of work. The workers may also receive proper training on handling cases of FAS to facilitate maximum intellectual output from these individuals. There is also a need for teachers, parents, and family to listen to these individuals and remain to understand their situation. The harmony will improve these individuals’ expression to their teachers for better academic and overall results.
References
Ben-Shachar, M. S., Shmueli, M., Jacobson, S. W., Meintjes, E. M., Molteno, C. D., Jacobson, J. L., & Berger, A. (2020). Prenatal alcohol exposure alters error detection during simple arithmetic processing: An electroencephalography study. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 44(1), 114–124.
Cleversey, K., Brown, J., & Kapasi, A. (2018). Educational services for youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder: Caregivers’ perspectives. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 16(5), 1156–1173.
Glass, L., Moore, E. M., Akshoomoff, N., Jones, K. L., Riley, E. P., & Mattson, S. N. (2017). Academic difficulties in children with prenatal alcohol exposure: Presence, profile, and neural correlates. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 41(5), 1024–1034.
write