learning difficulties
Jill Morgan continues our series on learning disabilities by looking at two of the less well known specific learning difficulties – dyscalculia and dyspraxia
when things don’t
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add up
n the last article in this series we looked briefly at dyslexia, which is often referred to as a specific learning difficulty. However, there are other specific learning difficulties which may be less well known than dyslexia but which will almost certainly affect some of the children you work with. Two of these are dyscalculia and dyspraxia.
Dyscalculia is a learning disability that has received relatively little attention from the research community, so not a great deal is known about it.
Number bonds
What we do know is that it affects children’s ability to learn in any situation where numbers and maths concepts are involved. For example, a child may be able to count from memory, but have no sense of what those numbers mean in relation to a number of objects; or a child may have great difficulty remembering even the simplest of number bonds (2 + 8 = 10) or multiplication table items (2 x 3 = 6). 18 Learning Support Spring Term [1] 2011
You have no doubt heard plenty of adults laughingly say that they are useless at maths – you may have said it yourself – but dyscalculia is more than a sense of not being very clever with numbers. You can probably add up the money in your purse, and do basic mental arithmetic, but even these simple maths operations are very difficult for the child with dyscalculia. Dyscalculia may affect as much as 6% of the population (that’s about 1 in 16 or, on average, two children in a class of 32). You can find more information about dyscalculia on the website www.aboutdyscalculia.org.
Language content
The British Dyslexia Association also offers information about dyscalculia on its website (www.bdadyslexia.org. uk) and offers advice on support for children with dyscalculia, as resources and professional help are less commonly available for this learning difficulty, due to the lack of research in this area. At least 50% of children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia also
have difficulties with maths, but at least some of that will be due to the language content of maths lessons. In the early years, number work may use only numbers or manipulatives (objects which can be counted, sorted, etc). However, written language is soon introduced into maths work, as children are required to read questions or write answers which include both questions and words. For children who display symptoms of both dyslexia and dyscalculia this presents them with an impossible task.