Dyscalculia vs maths anxiety: supporting students with barriers to learning mathematics 

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Dyscalculia is about how your brain is wired to process and understand numbers. Maths anxiety is about the feeling or reaction you have when encountering maths. It is an emotional response that can block the demonstration of knowledge you have previously learnt. With maths anxiety being an emotional response, it means mathematical performance varies dramatically depending on stress levels. Individuals may solve problems easily when in casual conversation, but freeze when it’s called a test or when they feel they are being watched.  

For people with dyscalculia, the struggles are consistent across situations and environments, and will often be apparent in number-related activities that aren’t typically thought of as maths – telling the time, remembering PIN numbers or estimating reasonable prices. 

Maths anxiety can develop at any point in an individual’s life, often relating to experiences such as a harsh teacher, public failure, timed test or comparison to peers. Dyscalculia presents from early childhood, though it is often underdiagnosed, particularly as it usually co-occurs with other learning differences or needs like ADHD, dyslexia, developmental language disorder or developmental coordination disorder. 

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Math Anxiety is REAL – and it can hold students back by up to half a school year

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Even students who seem confident in math can struggle when anxiety creeps in. It’s not just nerves. Anxiety literally steals working memory, leaving less brainpower for solving problems. Suddenly, concepts that were easy at home become impossible under pressure. This can make even familiar concepts harder to recall under pressure.

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Stanford Medicine Study Reveals How Math Learning Disabilities Impact Brain Problem-Solving

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A groundbreaking study conducted by researchers at Stanford Medicine offers new insight into the neural mechanisms underlying math learning disabilities in children, revealing that children with such impairments process math tasks differently at the brain level, despite achieving comparable accuracy on simple numerical comparisons. This discovery advances our understanding of the cognitive and neural intricacies that contribute to math struggles, underscoring the importance of targeting not just numerical skills but also cognitive control and error-monitoring processes in interventions.

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Numeracy Numeracy

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Abstract Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to acquire school-level arithmetic skills, affecting approximately 3-6% of individuals. Progress in understanding the root causes of DD and how best to treat it have been impeded by lack of widespread research and variation in characterizations of the disorder across studies. However, recent years have witnessed significant growth in the field, and a growing body of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence now points to an underlying deficit in the representation and processing of numerical magnitude information as a potential core deficit in DD. An additional product of the recent progress in understanding DD is the resurgence of a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ developmental dyscalculia. The first appears related to impaired development of brain mechanisms for processing numerical magnitude information, while the latter refers to mathematical deficits stemming from external factors such as poor teaching, low socio-economic status, and behavioral attention problems or domain-general cognitive deficits. Increased awareness of this distinction going forward, in combination with longitudinal empirical research, offers great potential for deepening our understanding of the disorder and developing effective educational interventions.

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