Dyscalculia is a specific learning difficulty affecting the normal acquisition of arithmetic skills. It usually co-occurs with other specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia or dyspraxia.
As with all specific learning difficulties, there are elements of cognition and memory that are different in children with dyscalculia, but it is characterised as a difficulty with mathematics, not commensurate with the child’s age and not due to lack of educational opportunities. It occurs in three to six per cent of the population and is as common in girls as boys.
Although dyscalculia is a neurological disorder and independent of intelligence, poor teaching and environmental deprivation can also have a part to play.
The American Psychiatric Association describes it as follows:
Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) is a specific learning disorder that is characterised by impairments in learning basic arithmetic facts, processing numerical magnitude and performing accurate and fluent calculations. These difficulties must be quantifiably below what is expected for an individual’s chronological age and must not be caused by poor educational or daily activities or by intellectual impairments.
So, dyscalculia could be described as a difficulty in the brain with the whole concept of numbers and how they relate to one another. At its extreme, acalculia, it means an inability even to count.
There isn't a single reason why many people fail to master maths, and academic consensus suggests that, despite some shocking levels of numeracy, only three to six per cent of pupils are dyscalculic.
This specific learning difficulty is only just becoming recognised in mainstream education, perhaps as a result of the continuing bad press for GCSE maths.
An early indicator is the persistent use of counting in ones rather than developing a recall of basic facts and relationships between numbers.
The first number test on the Butterworth Dyscalculia Screener is for subitising – that is, looking for a sense of what numbers are worth by testing the ability to look at a random cluster of dots and know how many there are without counting.
A later test examines how quickly and accurately children find the answers to basic addition sums such as 4 + 7. If children still count, they are likely to be slow and inaccurate. At a very basic level of skill development they will count all of the 4 + 7, rather than start at 4 (or better still at 7). Relying entirely on counting for addition and subtraction is a severe handicap in terms of speed and accuracy, the more so when trying to use it for bigger numbers and tasks such as multiplication and division.
Often a child’s page is covered in endless tally marks, and frequently these are just lined up, with no attempt at grouping. If you show them patterns of dots or groups, say tally groups of 5, they still prefer to see lines of individual markers.
Moving on from one-by-one counting to grouped tallies is just the beginning. Skill in numeracy requires the ability to recognise and use relationships in all numbers, such as seeing 9 as one less than 10; 6 + 5 as 5 + 5 + 1; counting on in twos, tens, fives, especially if the pattern isn’t the basic one of 10, 20, 30 ... but 13, 23, 33, 43...; to see the relationship between the four operations (+ x – and ÷); to see patterns and relationships in numbers and be able to manipulate them.
Early indicators of dyscalculia include some or all of:
With thanks to Steve Chinn, editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Dyscalculia and Mathematical Learning Difficulties.
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