Dyscalculia Treatment and Intervention

5 Strategies that Work

The term dyscalculia — from the Greek ‘dys’ and Latin ‘calculia’ — means to count badly and describes people with severe difficulties with numbers.

Compared to other learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, dyscalculia has received little attention, and the general public’s familiarity with it as a problem is relatively low. Even so, early intervention and treatment are essential to minimise the impact this learning disability can have on a child.

We will look at the importance of early intervention and investigate five strategies that should be part of any dyscalculia treatment plan.

What is Dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia is a learning disability in math. It is characterised by impairments in learning basic arithmetic facts, processing numerical quantities and performing accurate and fluent calculations. These difficulties are below what is expected for the individual’s chronological age and are not caused by poor education or intellectual deficits.

At the behavioural level, children with dyscalculia have difficulties retrieving arithmetic facts from memory. They commonly rely on immature strategies such as finger counting, while their age-matched peers easily retrieve arithmetic facts from memory.

Early Intervention for Dyscalculia is Best

Dyscalculia may have profound implications for children if no intervention or treatment is provided. Primarily, dyscalculia may impinge on the emotional well-being of students. For example, in a focus group carried out by Bevan and Butterworth with nine children with dyscalculia, many negative feelings were expressed related to the children’s constant failure in mathematics. The children reported feeling left out, blamed themselves for not knowing how to solve a task, cried and felt “horrible and stupid.”

In the long term, living with dyscalculia can be difficult. Difficulties vary from remembering important telephone numbers and dates to paying the right amount to the cashier when shopping and checking the change. Other tasks presenting problems could be cooking, planning appointments and being able to use the time available in a day appropriately. Adults with dyscalculia often feel embarrassed when faced with everyday tasks they cannot handle.

Math disabilities may negatively impact job opportunities and prospects in the workplace — even more than literacy difficulties. Students with poor numeracy skills tend to leave full-time education at their first chance. As a result, they are more likely to be unemployed, depressed, ill and arrested. All this illustrates that dyscalculia should be treated at a young age before it has irreversible effects.

Even a slight delay in math can translate into a significant gap between what a child is expected to do and know in math and what they can do. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Matthew Effect,” a term coined by Robert K. Meron in 1968 and referring to Matthew 25:29, which says the rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer.

Five Strategies for Dyscalculia Treatment

Like other learning disabilities, dyscalculia cannot be treated with medication. Instead, specialised learning strategies are required to treat the disorder. Below are the five most important strategies that need to be applied in any dyscalculia treatment plan: mistakes are made and that there is no growth when the answers are correct. Even if a mistake is not rectified, there will be growth. It is the struggle to get the right answers that fosters growth.

1. Adhere to fundamental learning principles. Learning is a stratified process. Specific skills have to be mastered first, before it becomes possible to master subsequent skills.

To be a football player, a person must first master the foundational skills, such as passing, kicking and tackling. In the same way, to do the maths, a child first has to learn the foundational skills of math, like visual perception and visual memory. So, for example, a child who confuses the signs +, -, ÷, and × may have a problem with visual discrimination of forms or visual discrimination of position in space. Likewise, a child with a poor sense of direction (i.e., north, south, east, and west) may have a problem with visual discrimination of position in space, etc.

The second step would be to master mathematical skills, which must be done sequentially. One has to learn to count before it becomes possible to learn to add and subtract. Suppose one tried to teach a child, who had not yet learned to count, to add and subtract. This would be impossible, and no amount of effort would ever succeed in teaching the child these skills. The child must learn to count first, before it becomes possible for him to learn to add and subtract.

The third step would be to ensure that a student catches up on the knowledge aspect of math.

2. Minimise anxiety.

Math anxiety causes the release of cortisol into the bloodstream. Cortisol refocuses the frontal lobe to deal with anxiety. Meanwhile, any unrelated learning in working memory is disrupted and lost (Sousa, 2015).

It is crucial to minimise anxiety levels as much as possible, as anxiety may be a disability in its own right. For example, anxiety may fill up the working memory space of the brain without allowing the complete and effective processing of numerical tasks.

Anxiety of any type causes the body to release the hormone cortisol into the bloodstream. Cortisol’s primary function is to refocus the brain on the source of the anxiety and determine what action to take to relieve the stress. As a result, heart rate increases and other physical worry indicators appear.

Meanwhile, the frontal lobe is no longer interested in learning or processing mathematical operations because it has to deal with what may be a threat to the individual’s safety. As a result, the student cannot focus on the learning task at hand and has to cope with the frustration of inattention. Furthermore, anxious feelings disrupt working memory’s ability to manipulate and retain numbers and numerical expressions.

Letting the student sit up straight is a simple way to minimise anxiety. In a study by San Francisco State University researchers, 125 college students were tested to see how well they could perform a simple math task — subtracting 7 from 843 sequentially for 15 seconds — while either slumped over or sitting up straight with shoulders back and relaxed. 56% of the students reported finding it easier to perform the math task upright.

For people who are anxious about math, posture makes an enormous difference. The slumped-over position shuts them down and their brains do not work either. As a result, they cannot think as clearly.

One of the most powerful moves a teacher or parent can make is changing the messages they give about mistakes and wrong answers in mathematics. Teaching students that mistakes are positive has an incredibly liberating effect on them.

5. Repetition is not the enemy.

In the 1920s and 1930s, repetition and rote learning came to define bad teaching. Teachers were told that drill-andpractice dulls students’ creativity and that rote learning in math classes is anti-right brain and, therefore, potentially criminal, as it robs all students of the opportunity to develop their human potential.

The phrase “drill and kill” is still used in educational circles, meaning that by drilling the student, you will kill their motivation to learn.

When properly conducted, however, drill-and-practice is a consistently effective teaching method and should not be slighted as “low level,” and appears to be just as essential to complex and creative intellectual performance as they are to the performance of a virtuoso violinist.

A meta-analysis of 85 academic intervention studies with students with learning disabilities, carried out by Swanson and Sachse-Lee, found that regardless of the practical or theoretical orientation of the study, the largest effect sizes were obtained by interventions that included systematic drill, repetition, practice and review.

This article has been reprinted with permission.

3. Teach in a multisensory way.

Information is taken into the brain through three main channels: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. Many students with a learning disability are weak in one or more of these channels. Therefore, teaching in a multisensory way using all three channels simultaneously, will help them as their weaker channels are supported by their stronger ones.

4. Make the most of mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes - they are vital to developing understanding. Unfortunately, constantly making mistakes in math can lead some children to give up. However, research by Jo Boaler and Carol Dweck at Stanford University has shown that synapses grow in the brain when

Susan du Plessis

Susan du Plessis, author and researcher of learning difficulties (including dyslexia), has worked for 25 years developing tools to help children and adults improve their cognitive abilities and overcome learning obstacles. After training thousands of teachers and tutors worldwide, Susan opened the Edublox clinic where classes are offered to develop cognitive abilities, language, reading and spelling skills. Susan’s passion are “Zero to Hero” stories she sees in her students every day as they grow.