When I started this research I expected dyscalculia to be a niche condition — something a handful of children had, easily addressed with extra practice. The numbers don’t support that. Roughly 5–7% of school-age children have dyscalculia: a specific learning difficulty with number sense that is neurological in origin, persistent across development, and largely invisible in standard classroom assessments.
It’s not “bad at maths.” A child with dyscalculia might have strong reading comprehension, solid spatial reasoning, and consistently fail to grasp that 9 comes before 10. The difficulty is specific, categorical, and resistant to the kind of general maths instruction classrooms provide. Standard adaptive apps — the ones with stars and progress bars — don’t help much because they adapt difficulty without adapting to the mechanism of the difficulty. A child who confuses 51 for 15 (digit reversal) needs something different from a child who skips borrowing. Treating both as “got it wrong, try again” misses the point.
This is the gap NumPath is designed to study. Not to solve — to study, rigorously, in a randomised controlled trial.
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