Category Archives: Research

Dyslexia more than 100 times more likely to be diagnosed than maths-learning disorder

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Researchers in Northern Ireland have found that many children are suffering from an undiagnosed developmental condition which affects their ability to learn maths.

A team of academics at Queen’s University Belfast who examined the performance of more than 2,400 primary schoolchildren found that some 112 children had a specific learning disorder in maths.

However, just one of these children was diagnosed with a specific maths-learning disorder, also known as dyscalculia.

The prevalence of the condition is thought to be similar to dyslexia, though there is far less awareness of it.

Read all about it HERE

Teaching reasoning strategies to dyscalculic students with low working memory level

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Dyscalculic students believe they need to memorize mathematical facts. This is due to their inability to think flexibly and their lack of knowledge about the possibility of performing operations by structuring numbers. So, the aim of this study is to teach dyscalculic students to use reasoning strategies. The study employed an instructional experiment, a research design that enables the investigation of how mental processes evolve in student-friendly learning environments. Six fifth-grade middle school dyscalculic students participated. Before the implementation, we observed that none of the students employed reasoning strategies. Over a six-week period, the application included activities aimed at teaching reasoning strategies for dyscalculic students. The implementation resulted in students’ ability to understand the relationships between numbers in addition and subtraction operations and employ various strategies during these operations. This result suggests that applying appropriate interventions to dyscalculic students can lead to significant progress and the acquisition of reasoning strategies.

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The Mental Number Line in Dyscalculia: Impaired Number Sense or Access from Symbolic Numbers?

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Numbers may be manipulated and represented mentally over a compressible number line oriented from left to right. According to numerous studies, one of the primary reasons for dyscalculia is related to improper understanding of the mental number line. Children with dyscalculia usually show difficulty when they have to place Arabic numbers on a physical number line. However, it remains unclear whether they have a deficit with the mental number line per se or a deficit with accessing it from nonsymbolic and/or symbolic numbers. Quebec French-speaking 8- to 9-year-old children with (24) and without (37) dyscalculia were assessed with transcoding tasks (“number-to-position” and “position-to-number”) designed to assess the acuity of the mental number line with Arabic and spoken numbers as well as with analogic numerosities. Results showed that children with dyscalculia produced a larger percentage absolute error than children without mathematics difficulties in every task except the number-to-position transcoding task with analogic numerosities. Hence, these results suggested that children with dyscalculia do not have a general deficit of the mental number line but rather a deficit with accessing it from symbolic numbers.

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ADHD, Dyslexia, and Dyscalculia: Connected, but Not How You Think

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A recent large-scale study involving nearly 20,000 Dutch twins provides essential insights into these questions. Researchers Elsje van Bergen and her colleagues looked at the co-occurrence of ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia among children aged 7 and 10. They found that while these conditions indeed appear together more frequently than expected by chance—children with ADHD were more than twice as likely to also have dyslexia or dyscalculia—most children actually had only one of these challenges. Specifically, about 77% of children with one condition had no additional learning difficulties.

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Co-Occurrence and Causality Among ADHD, Dyslexia, and Dyscalculia

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ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia often co-occur, and the underlying continuous traits are correlated (ADHD symptoms, reading, spelling, and math skills). This may be explained by trait-to-trait causal effects, shared genetic and environmental factors, or both. We studied a sample of ≤ 19,125 twin children and 2,150 siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register, assessed at ages 7 and 10. Children with a condition, compared to those without that condition, were 2.1 to 3.1 times more likely to have a second condition. Still, most children (77.3%) with ADHD, dyslexia, or dyscalculia had just one condition. Cross-lagged modeling suggested that reading causally influences spelling (β = 0.44). For all other trait combinations, cross-lagged modeling suggested that the trait correlations are attributable to genetic influences common to all traits, rather than causal influences. Thus, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia seem to co-occur because of correlated genetic risks, rather than causality.

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