Neuroanatomical correlates of developmental dyscalculia: combined evidence from morphometry and tractography.

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Poor mathematical abilities adversely affect academic and career opportunities. The neuroanatomical basis of developmental dyscalculia (DD), a specific learning deficit with prevalence rates exceeding 5%, is poorly understood. We used structural MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine macro- and micro-structural impairments in 7- to 9-year-old children with DD, compared to a group of typically developing (TD) children matched on age, gender, intelligence, reading abilities and working memory capacity. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) revealed reduced grey matter (GM) bilaterally in superior parietal lobule, intra-parietal sulcus, fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and right anterior temporal cortex in children with DD. VBM analysis also showed reduced white matter (WM) volume in right temporal-parietal cortex. DTI revealed reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) in this WM region, pointing to significant right hemisphere micro-structural impairments.

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The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School

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Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day’s math homework. The assignment: Create a “stem-and-leaf” plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:

a) Stare blankly

b) Google “stem-and-leaf plot”

c) Say, “Why do you need to know that?”

d) Shrug and say, “I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class.”

If you’re a parent of a certain age, your kids’ homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays — which can make you feel like you’re not very good with numbers.

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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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Dyscalculia from Pondering the Classroom

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When I teach Managerial Accounting, I emphasize to students that in many areas of business it is necessary to read numbers and understand the patterns that are present.   I have always wondered why some very smart students who study are unable to do either one.   Perhaps it is due to dyscalculia.

Two fundamental skills underlie almost everything I do in the course:

  1. Starting with the average cost for some amount of units and then calculating the resulting total cost, and vice versa.
  2. Identifying the pattern inherent in a sequence of numbers and calculating what would come next, or what came before.

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