The study, published in the Journal of Cognition and Development, found that “students in urban poverty performed at just below the 40th percentile in both verbal and spatial working memory, students in rural poverty performed better in verbal-memory tasks—at the 45th percentile—and significantly worse in visual-spatial working memory, at the 29th percentile,” the article notes.
“I was surprised to see the visual spatial weakness in the rural population,” Tine, an assistant professor in the Department of Education and the principal investigator of Dartmouth’s Poverty and Learning Lab, tells Education Week. “It’s exciting to me because there’s so little comparative work looking at rural versus urban poverty.”
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