How can people be tested for dyscalculia?

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One of my particular interests within special needs is dyscalculia, and the question I am asked most is that of how people can be tested for dyscalculia. It is also a difficult question to answer.

The main reason for testing for dyscalculia would be to ensure that they are getting the right sort of maths education. However, it is my belief that the methods that can be used to help overcome maths problems in children – and indeed in adults – are the same whatever the cause of the inability to do maths.

A child might struggle with maths because he/she is dyscalculic. Or because the child missed a lot of education through illness. Or because the child misbehaved in class, or didn’t like the teacher. Maybe the child heard the parent say, “Don’t worry I was no good at maths either” and so thought it was ok not to be able to do maths, and so stopped trying. Maybe the maths teacher was off sick for a long time and the replacement wasn’t very good.

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Difficulty or Dyscalculia?

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Burgeoning research into students’ difficulties with mathematics is starting to tease out cognitive differences between students who sometimes struggle with math and those who have dyscalculia, a severe, persistent learning disability in math.

A new, decade-long longitudinal study by researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, published Friday in the journal Child Development, finds that 9th-graders considered dyscalculic—those who performed in the bottom 10 percent of math ability on multiple tests—had substantially lower ability to grasp and compare basic number quantities than average students or even other struggling math students.

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Are Math Skills Built In To The Human Brain?

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Psychologist Véronique Izard discusses a study that suggests Amazonian villagers with no math schooling are just as equipped to solve basic geometry problems as math-trained adults, and cognitive neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth talks about the arithmetic cousin of dyslexia, dyscalculia.

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How old am I? Gimme a second, I KNOW this…

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So while helping the students I tutor with their LD final notes today, the topic of dyscalculia came up. After we discussed it at length, it occurs me to how little people know about it. As someone with dyscalculia, here are my finer points:

I cannot compute numbers in my head aside from what we memorize: 2+2=4 etc,. When I try, it’s literally like hitting a mental roadblock. I got nothing. Have to write it down or get a calculator. Formulas and mental calculations are OUT, unless you want me to get that glazed look and start getting shifty.
Time is dicey. I cannot mentally determine how much time it’s going to take to get somewhere, do something, or how much time has passed. I’m either late or early – RARELY on time. This is also why when someone asks my age, I typically can’t remember. I’m usually off by a year. I also have a hard time determining when something happened, e.g, “was that four years ago or five?” I estimate everything. Also, I can read a regular watch, but it takes me a few minutes to figure it out. I wear a watch, so when someone asks me the time, I usually just show it to them. Evasive measures.
Distance is also tricky. I could not tell you if something is [this many] yards, feet, or miles. Continue reading →

When [5] looks like [6]

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When [5] looks like [6] : a deficit of the number magnitude representation in developmental dyscalculia : behavioural and brain-imaging investigation

The learning of mathematics covers a variety of skills, such as comparing quantities, counting the number of items in a set, dealing with the numerical systems (i.e., writing and reading numbers), performing simple and complex calculations, or solving word problems. Typically, a majority of children are able to master these abilities, but an appreciable percentage of them does not and are then referenced as having developmental dyscalculia. It is clear that not being able to count efficiently, to understand the meaning of numbers, or to calculate as other children do, rapidly becomes a handicap during the development, not only at school but also in society in general, in the same way as not being able to read is. Despite the growing interest observed over these last few years, research on developmental dyscalculia or more general mathematical disability is actually much less advanced than research on dyslexia. It could be due to the complexity of the mathematics field. Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for this learning deficit, but the origin(s) of developmental dyscalculia remain(s) unclear.

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