Each week we will be sharing a tip from our school psychologist, Mrs. Rollins.

This week we are talking about – What is Dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia is a math learning disability that can impact a person’s ability to understand, learn and do math. Early signs can be difficulty with counting, knowing a numeric symbol represents a number of items, and continuing to use finger counting when most other children count in their mind.

Dyscalculia is different than math anxiety where someone’s emotional response to math overpowers their ability to do math. Students with dyscalculia often develop math anxiety, but an emotional response is not the initial reason why they can’t do math, but develops as they struggle to learn math in school. Dyscalculia also tends to co-occur with ADHD, Autism, and other learning disabilities like Dyslexia.

Most people have Developmental Dyscalculia or difficulty with math since early childhood. However, Acquired Dyscalculia can occur due to a brain injury or diseases. Low math performance could also result from dyslexia affecting comprehension of word problems, limited working memory, or visual perceptual problems that are affecting a student’s ability to interpret graphs or charts.

Students with Dyscalculia are often eligible for special education services under Specific Learning Disability in Math Calculation and/or Math Problem Solving and can be helped by the following accommodations:

• Allow more time on assignments and tests.
• Be able to show competence on fewer numbers of problems.
• Calculator use on multi-step problems.
• Reference sheet available to aid recall of math functions.
• Multisensory approach: drawing out problems, touch math, talking through equations, etc.

Students with Dyscalculia tend to still struggle with math concepts as an adult trying to live independently or complete higher education. Managing personal finances can be accommodated with banking and money apps. Go to the accessibilities (ADA) office on-campus to properly document your dyscalculia as a learning disability so accommodations can continue in college or technical school.

Child Mind Institute, Attitude Magazine, Read and Spell, and Frontiers have all published on this topic if you are interested in reading more about it. 

For more information: https://childmind.org/article/how-to-spot-dyscalculia/

What Is Dyscalculia? Math Learning Disability Overview

https://www.readandspell.com/us/dyscalculia-in-adults

https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00057

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