Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to do math. Much like dyslexia disrupts areas of the brain related to reading, dyscalculia affects brain areas that handle math and number-related skills and understanding. Symptoms of this condition usually appear in childhood, but adults may have dyscalculia without knowing it.

Dyscalculia is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers which can lead to a diverse range of difficulties with mathematics. Dyscalculia is sometimes called “math dyslexia,” and causes problems for kids when it comes to reading, writing and understanding numbers. While kids with dyslexia struggle with letters and words, kids with dyscalculia often:

• Read numbers incorrectly
• Have trouble copying and writing math numbers and symbols
• Have trouble with math concepts, such as counting, measuring and estimating
• Struggle to master the “basics” (such as doing quick addition and subtraction in their head) that are key to working independently and efficiently

How does dyscalculia affect the brain?

People who have dyscalculia are neuro-divergent. Neurodiversity is a term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. For people with dyscalculia, this means that their brain works differently from the brain of someone who doesn’t have disorders or conditions that affect how their brain works.

Symptoms and Causes

Young children (Up to Preschool level)

The most common symptoms include trouble with:

• Counting upward
• Connecting a number to that many of an object (for example, connecting number 4 to that many marbles or blocks in front of them)
• Recognizing numbers and math symbols
• Organizing numbers such as largest to smallest or first to last
• Recognizing and using number lines
• Learning using money (such as coins or bills)

 

School-age children (primary/grade/elementary school)

The symptoms of dyscalculia often become noticeable when a child starts school at the age of 6. These symptoms include:

• Counting on fingers with small numbers (especially at an age where that seems unnecessary).
• Identifying small quantities of items just by looking (this looks like needing to count each one by one).
• Doing simple calculations from memory.
• Memorizing multiplication tables.
• Recognizing the same math problem when the order of the numbers or symbols changes (struggling to understand that 5 + 3 = 8 is the same as 8 = 3 + 5
• Understanding word problems or more advanced symbols (such as > meaning “greater than” or < meaning “less than”).
• Organizing numbers by scale (10s, 100s, 1,000s) or decimal places (0.1, 0.01, 0.001)

 

Teenagers (Secondary School or High School Age) and Adults

The symptoms for secondary school age and adults often look like trouble with the following:

• Counting backwards
• Solving word problems
• Breaking down problems into multiple steps to solve them
• Measuring items
• Measuring quantities (such as for cooking/baking recipes)
• Using money to pay for items, exchanging bills for coins (and vice versa) and making change.
• Understanding and converting fractions

Emotional Symptoms

When faced with situations where math is necessary, people with dyscalculia may show emotional symptoms such as:

• Anxiety or panic
• Agitation, anger or aggression (such as temper tantrums in younger children
• Fear (including a fear or even phobia of going to school).
• Physical symptoms of any of the above (nausea and vomiting, sweating, stomach ache, etc.)

Causes of dyscalculia

No one really knows why dyscalculia happens, However, there is evidence that learning disorders – including dyscalculia – may run in families though more research is necessary to confirm this.

Experts have discovered that people with dyscalculia are more likely to have certain differences in some parts of their brain. These differences seem to indicate less development and fewer connections between brain cells in those areas. The affected areas are the ones the brain uses when doing anything that involves numbers and calculations. However, experts don’t know why these differences happen and how they influence this disorder’s symptoms.

 

Treatment for dyscalculia

Tests

Early detection and evaluation to identify the specific weak skills that are responsible for a child’s poor academic performance is of utmost importance. Through our online battery of cognitive test parameters, we identify the weak cognitive skills that are responsible for the reading and learning difficulties.

Training

The fastest and most effective way to correct the underlying brain differences that cause dyscalculia is by engaging the affected individual in cognitive training to strengthen the weak cognitive skills that are responsible for the problem through dynamic training, drills and practice that engage the brain and significantly stretch the mental abilities.

Cognitive training energizes the affected areas of the brain, creates more neural pathways in those areas, and enables the individual to learn easier, faster and more effectively.

 

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