About Dyscalculia
Dyscalculia is a learning disability involving math, occurring in someone with normal or above-average intelligence. Much less research has been done on this learning disability compared with dyslexia, but it may have a similar genetic and neurological origin.
The Educator’s Diagnostic Manual lists several sub-types of dyscalculia. Someone with dyscalculia may have trouble with any of the following aspects of mathematics:
- Organizing problems on the page, keeping numbers lined up, following through on long division problems
- Putting language to math processes
- Understanding and doing word problems
- Keeping score during games or difficulty remembering how to keep score in games like bowling
- Remembering dance step sequences and rules for playing sports
- Sight-reading music, learning fingering to play an instrument
- Understanding the abstract concepts of time and direction
- Grasping and remembering math concepts, rules, formulas, sequence (order of operations), and basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts
- Recalling schedules and sequences of past or future events
- Strategic planning ability for games like chess
- Being on time
- Mentally figuring out change due back and the amounts to pay for tips and taxes
- Sense of direction
- Grasping concepts of formal music education
- Understanding money and cash transactions
- Athletic coordination
- Recalling dates or addresses
- Visualizing or picturing the location of the numbers on the face of a clock or the geographical locations of states, countries, ocean, and streets, for example
- Long term-memory (retention and retrieval) of concept mastery; may be able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next
- Memory for the layout of things (for example, gets lost or disoriented easily)
The Educator’s Diagnostic Manual states: "As with reading and writing, explicit, systematic instruction that provides guided meaningful practice with feedback usually improves the math performance of students with learning disabilities." Dyscalculia can be remediated with multisensory educational techniques adapted from the Orton-Gillingham methods for use with math.