Celia Stone, Dyslexia and Dyscalculia Pioneer

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Celia Stone is one of the most inspiring, yet unassuming women I’ve ever met. She has changed the lives of both my husband and my daughter, along with thousands of other young people.

She has tackles every challenge that life has throws at her with pragmatism and the question, ‘how can we make a plan?’: From fleeing the threat of violence and unrest in her native Zimbabwe in the 70’s, with her husband, 3 small children, £500 and whatever they could carry; to setting up a specialist dyslexia unit at the Yorkshire school where her husband taught.

She now has more than 35 years’ experience of working with children with special educational needs – including my husband who was thrown out of his local primary school aged 7, because they ‘couldn’t teach him’. With Celia’s help, his dyslexia hasn’t held him back and he has gone on to become a successful entrepreneur, speaker and local businessman. At 18, she screened him for Irlen lenses – coloured glasses which helped him read for the first time. 25 years later she did the same for our daughter.

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No writers for dyscalculia students

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Math is not the only problem affecting students with learning disabilities appear to be in a fix this exam season. Students suffering from dyscalculia are having difficulty obtaining writers for their Arithmetic paper.

Dyscalculia is a math disorder where candidates have difficulty with spatial orientation as well as the concepts involved in mathematics. The state board conducts a special exam for them where their math paper is simplified and of a lower class 7 level. Hence students are only allowed writers from class 6 to write this paper.

Parents and students of this learning disability have been calling the board helpline stating their inability to find writers for their exam on March 15. Ashwini Sethi, a parent whose child was diagnosed with dyscalculia at 12 years of age said, “We had earlier found plenty of writers, most of them my daughter’s friends, who were studying in class 9 and helped her write her other papers. But now we are in a soup,” she said adding that even if she found a student willing to write her daughter’s papers, he/ she might not be able to understand the concepts and make mistakes.

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Access to Math

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MAKING MATH ACCESSIBLE TO STUDENTS WITH MATH LEARNING DISABILITY

UNDERSTANDING DYSCALCULIA: Sequential memory is very limited and working math memory is too short to hold complex chunks of information and instructions. Most cannot even keep track when counting 100 pennies. Most cannot count by 3 beyond 12 without manually adding 3 to each increment. Because they cannot consistently recall addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, even simple tasks become complex efforts of manual calculation. This is why it is mandatory that Math LD students master the use of a calculator appropriate to their academic level.

Since math LD students suffer with directional disorientation, they get extremely disoriented when

doing operations like long division, multiplication, fractions and equations because of all of the computational directions involved.

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Research into dyscalculia doesn’t add up

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An international paper has called for a greater research focus on dyscalculia, the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia, saying it could lift economic growth.

Dyscalculia is estimated to affect up to seven per cent of the population, making it as common as dyslexia.

But, in a review published today in the journal Science, lead author Professor Brian Butterworth, of the University College London, and colleagues label the disorder a “poor cousin” of its literary stablemate.

“The relative poverty of dyscalculia funding is clear from the figures. Since 2000, the National Institute of Health has spent US$107.2 million (AU$100 million) funding dyslexia research but only US$2.3 million (AU$2.16 million) on dyscalculia,” they write.

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Estimation without Counting Observed in Artificial Neural Network

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Researchers have been wondering for a long time how humans learn. After all, no one is born with an understanding of math or language, yet both of these develop throughout early life. In the case of math at least, many forms of life, including humans, have demonstrated an ability to understand when one set is larger than another, without counting the items. Now a virtual neural network has done the same.

This neural network was designed only to mimic the retina of an eye and then generate false images, similar to what it originally saw. How the neurons fire as the original image is viewed and the false ones made is recorded. The researchers found the lowest level of neurons, those furthest from the virtual retina, were firing based on the number of objects in the original image, despite the fact that there is no understanding of numbers in the program. This information was then given to a second program which was able to estimate whether the image had more or fewer objects than some reference number the researchers also gave it.

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