Bowl of Number Soup
Dyscalculia, math anxiety, attention disorders and dyslexia can all make numbers feel scrambled. A student explains the differences.
It’s not a very commonly known dysfunction, but dyscalculia is a math comprehension impairment that may affect more people than what researchers can discover. Most parents, teachers, or schools usually recognize dyscalculia as math dyslexia or a math learning disability. Many people struggle with mathematics but not all cases are considered dyscalculia.
To get to the basics, dyscalculia is a disability that limits the memorization and understanding of numbers. This disables students from grasping simple concepts like counting on a number line. The numbers don’t advance in an order but instead are scrambled terms to a student with math dyslexia.
At young ages, the signs of dyscalculia can be seen in the habits of learning because researchers have found some evidence to suggest that it’s a genetic impairment. An article from www.understood.org writes about the indications of dyscalculia that can be seen in students. Avoiding games that involve counting concepts or numbers is a signal of math dyslexia, as well as having trouble telling time on an analog clock.
They also highlight how their self esteem and anxiety levels are affected by the disorder. When a student continues to fail in class because they can’t understand, their confidence level could plummet.
Due to impacting confidence in one’s self, dyscalculia students may not grasp maps or graphing as well as other students. A student with math dyslexia may also be able to copy steps of how to solve a problem but remain unsure on why they’re doing it or how to apply it to another problem.
It can also interfere with clumsiness. People with dyscalculia have a hard time with predicting the space in between areas. They could be walking down the stairs and misjudge the width apart from the step they’re standing on and tumble downward.
Dyscalculia.org describes dyscalculia as being the more severe version out of several math problems. All complications are impacted by brain development but the limitations to each vary as situations change.
Math anxiety is one form of a math learning disability. Students that become overly anxious when faced with a math problem have a hard time focusing in class. Classrooms demand students to understand and pick up on topics quickly, though this overwhelms the brain and it shuts down. Testing can be harder when there isn’t any guided help and lots of stress. Teachers who recognize this will sometimes slow down the pace as much as possible or work with the student individually to ensure their comprehension in the subject.
ADD and ADHD are also ways in which students could be lacking in mathematics. The attention span of people with attention disorders can be short and they’re easily unfocused in class. This could make math a lot more challenging because it is a subject that requires focus on one thing at a time. The notes can be long and the process overviews become boring to students with ADD or ADHD and they’re less likely to succeed in math. These problems can go unnoticed, making it harder for them to be diagnosed and treated.
Dyslexia is the more well known brain disorder that occurs in people. It’s typically thought to affect reading, and though it does, it can also affect math. Students with dyslexia could struggle with the order of numbers in pairs or having multiple digits. To them the numbers look like a bowl of number soup: scrambled and stirred. It would be easy to see a twenty-nine as a ninety-two for someone with dyslexia.
As common as dyscalculia may be among students, there are other dysfunctions that can affect one’s math abilities and not be as consequential.
Sources
- Understood.org: https://www.understood.org/en/learning-attention-issues/child-learning-disabilities/dyscalculia/understanding-dyscalculia
- Dyscalculia.org: http://www.dyscalculia.org/dyscalculia/math-dyslexia
What researchers found
Two later papers echo points made here. A 2016 report on PerContare, a three-year Italian project (arXiv:1602.03365), set out to reduce false positives in dyscalculia diagnoses among third graders by designing hands-on, visual teaching activities for early arithmetic, which fits the reminder that not every struggling student has dyscalculia. On math anxiety, a 2021 review (arXiv:2108.13800) reports that it affects roughly 20% of students in 63 out of 64 education systems worldwide, that it is widespread even among high-performing learners, and that it correlates only weakly with academic performance.
Questions people ask
What is dyscalculia?
Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that makes it hard to learn or understand arithmetic. People with it can struggle to grasp what numbers mean, to manipulate them, to do calculations and to remember basic math facts. It is also known as specific learning disorder with impairment in mathematics, and is sometimes called math dyslexia.
How common is dyscalculia?
Estimates usually put dyscalculia at about 3 to 6 percent of the general population. Figures vary from country to country and between studies, partly because researchers use different tests and cutoffs to decide who has it, so any single number should be read as a rough range.
What are common signs of dyscalculia?
Common signs include trouble with mental arithmetic, difficulty telling time on an analog clock, counting on fingers for simple sums long after classmates stop, slow recognition of small quantities at a glance, and difficulty memorizing basic facts such as times tables. Adults may have trouble handling coins, making change or comparing numbers.
