Category Archives: Research

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.

See more about it HERE

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.

Read all about it HERE

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.

Read the full article HERE

What if it is NOT dyscalculia?

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Do you, or someone you know, find maths challenging? You may have thought about dyscalculia, particularly as the Dyscalculia Network is so good at raising awareness. However, there are many reasons why someone might find maths difficult, and it’s important that these difficulties don’t get overlooked.

In this post, I try to explain the wide range of causes behind maths difficulties, how they can overlap, and how understanding these different challenges is key to getting the appropriate help.

Read the whole post HERE

Super power of small numbers

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Dyscalculia: News from the web:

It seems that small numbers have superpowers in our brain and can overrule larger numbers. So, the cell for recognizing 3 will shut down the neighbors for 4 and 5 and make sure we easily recognize it is 3. Now this goes away with larger numbers.

Read all about it HERE