Developmental Dyscalculia Information and Facts

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What is Developmental Dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia is a form of learning disability that affects a person's ability to acquire math skills an average child might. In the past, things such as low intelligence, environmental deprivation, or poor instruction have all been used to explain the disability. Current information indicates that the learning disability is actually a brain-based one with a familial-genetic predisposition. The disability is believed to involve both hemispheres of a person's brain, although it particularly involves the left parietotemporal areas.

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Developmental dyscalculia is a fairly common disability, with a prevalence among school-aged persons of around five-to-six percent. There is a similar level of occurrence among people who experience Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or developmental dyslexia. People with epilepsy, fragile x syndrome, and developmental language disorder may also experience developmental dyscalculia. The numbers of females and males who experience the disability are fairly equivalent. The effects of the disability on a person's education and subsequent psychological well-being and employment remain unknown.

Strategy and Developmental Dyscalculia

Studies related to developmental dyscalculia and children have primarily focused on the child's arithmetic skill's development. The areas of study pursued may be divided into two different sections; counting knowledge and strategy and memory development. Counting involves five essential principles:

• The 'abstraction rule,' which states that objects can be counted
• The 'order of irrelevance rule,' which states that items in a set can be counted in any order
• The 'one-to-one correspondence rule,' whereby one word is assigned to each counted object
• The 'stable order rule,' whereby the order of counting words needs to remain stable across different sets of counted objects

Mastering the principles of counting is needed to discover the most efficient strategies for basic math procedures, to include adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

A number of the models of cognitive development prompt the thought that children think or behave in a particular way under certain rule for lengthy periods of time. Children then undergo a brief and at times unexplained transition, thinking and behaving in a new way. Another thought-line is that developmental change in children is both variable and gradual, involving several strategies that are available to the child as their brain matures. Issues arise when there truly is only one efficient or logical strategy. After experimenting for a period of time with various strategies in both progressive and regressive directions, the majority of children focus on the best and most logical strategy and continue to use it for the rest of their lives.

A child without developmental dyscalculia will use various strategies to solve problems that are the same or similar. Three plus three always equals six. Other children might choose to count up from the larger number; 9+2=(9+1)+1=10+1=11. Others decompose into more easily manipulated numbers. Children eventually end up using one or another of these or another strategy with other addition problems.

One thought is that children with developmental dyscalculia might not be able to find a preferred strategy for solving math problems. While this doesn't prevent the child from becoming proficient over a longer period of time, it will most likely find them falling behind others in their class and experiencing significant slow-downs relating to problem-solving strategies. Evidence has shown that children with developmental dyscalculia are often two grade levels behind their peers in math.

Memory and Developmental Dyscalculia

Once children have gone through a period of exploration regarding uncovering the best problem-solving strategies for them, mastery of math is achieved when all basic facts may be retrieved from their long-term memories without mistakes. Mastering basic math is essential to further ability to work with more complex math operations like long division, fractions, geometry, or algebra. Even if a child has mastered their most efficient strategies, deficits in their memory might lead to disabilities in math.

When a person does a math problem, the likelihood of them being able to directly retrieve a solution to the same problem increases each time they do the problem. For the execution of a computational strategy to lead to the creation of long-term memory between the issue and the solution, both the equation's, 'augend,' or first number, and, 'addend,' or second number, as well as the answer, all have to be simultaneously active in the person's working memory.

For someone to create a long-term memory for a math fact such as 17+3+20, they have been both accurate and efficient. Accuracy is important because if the person commits numerous computational errors, they are more likely to retrieve incorrect answers from their long-term memory later on when faced with the same issue. Being efficient with math problems is also significant because with slow counting speed, a person's working memory representation of the augend is more likely to decay before the addend and solution have been presented fully. When this occurs, even if a person finds the right answer, their association with the rest of the equation in their long-term memory is weak.

Attention and Developmental Dyscalculia

Inhibition is also associated with information processing and involves the active suppression of irrelevant sensory input. Relating to this idea is the idea of resistance to interference, or attention - the ability of a person to concentrate on information while ignoring peripheral or outside information. Non-disabled students might complete a math worksheet in the midst of a noisy classroom with a minimal amount of distraction, while still achieving a high level of accuracy. Students with developmental dyscalculia might experience problems because of a deficit in inhibition.

People who experience developmental dyscalculia are not low in intelligence. Their ability to work with strategies related to math, proceed towards greater abilities in the field of study, as well as potential memory issues and attention difficulties, find them experiencing hardships with numbers and math. Many people with developmental dyscalculia excel in other areas of study.

Author Credentials:

Thomas C. Weiss is a researcher and editor for Disabled World. Thomas attended college and university courses earning a Masters, Bachelors and two Associate degrees, as well as pursing Disability Studies. As a Nursing Assistant Thomas has assisted people from a variety of racial, religious, gender, class, and age groups by providing care for people with all forms of disabilities from Multiple Sclerosis to Parkinson's; para and quadriplegia to Spina Bifida.

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