Calculating a Response to Dyscalculia: What to Do When Your Child is “Number Blind”

• June 23, 2011 by Cory Armes

Do you know any children or adults who struggle with math?  Perhaps they have difficulty with basic math skills and seem unable to understand what math process to use with which problem.  Maybe they are unable to organize objects in a logical way or have difficulty with measurement of either time or money.  If you know people with these types of struggles, they may have dyscalculia.

Dyscalculia, also called “number blindness” or “numerical blindness,” is a learning disability that inhibits a person's ability to use and have a proper sense of numbers.  Literally meaning “bad counting,” dyscalculia is estimated to impact three to six percent of the population so is just as prevalent as dyslexia but often goes undiagnosed since those with this disability often excel in reading and other subject areas. 

Many people believe that math can be a difficult subject to teach or that some students just don’t “get it”.  But for those who truly have dyscalculia, it is not about how the subject is taught; it is a lack of number sense.  Two main areas of weakness may contribute to this learning disability: visual-spatial issues and language processing difficulties.  With visual-spatial weaknesses, the learner has a problem processing what the eye sees so he or she may have difficulty visualizing patterns or parts of a math problem.  Making sense of what the ear hears is the issue with language processing weakness which leads to a hard time grasping math vocabulary and building on math knowledge since there is a difficulty in understanding what the words represent.

Identification of any learning disability requires a trained professional who can evaluate a student to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses in learning.  An in-depth assessment compares what the student’s expected level of performance is to what he or she actually can do in areas of mathematical skill and understanding.  It also is helpful for at least an overview of this information to be shared with the student (especially the strengths) since knowing how you learn best is a good way to help students learn to compensate for difficulties and to build academic success and confidence.

So what can be done for those who have dyscalculia?  The first step is for parents, teachers and other educational specialists to use the evaluation results to develop strategies to address the student’s math skills.  Some will benefit from additional tutoring that adjusts the learning pace and focuses on specific areas of difficulty with repeated reinforcement of key skills.  For those with visual-spatial weaknesses, using graph paper can be helpful for organizing ideas and for those with language processing issues, clear explanations and frequent checks for understanding are important.  And, as with most students with learning disabilities, having all of the needed materials and working in a place with limited distractions is always a good idea!

As with any learning disability, the earlier that the dyscalculia can be identified and remediated, the greater the chance that your child will stay on track or stay motivated to catch up.  Talking with your child’s teacher is the best place to start so make that call or, if the teacher has contacted you, be open to their concerns.    As your child’s advocate, you can help make the difference in gaining access to the right resources to help your child work through learning challenges and achieve academic success.

Want more information on dyscalculia?  Here are some online resources:

What is Dyscalculia?

Number Blindness – More Common that Dyslexia

Dyscalculia.org

Related Reading:

What is Number Sense and How Does it Relate to Math Skills?

Do Teachers Give Students Math Anxiety?

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Categories: Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic problems, auditory processing, cognitive skills, learning disabilities, math, processing, processing rate, remedial education, struggling students

Dyslexic Learners Dramatically Improve Reading Skills with Fast ForWord

• October 12, 2010 by Barbara Calhoun, Ph.D

This study was conducted by Nadine Gaab and her colleagues and was published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience in 2007.  Studies have shown that in adults with developmental dyslexia, there is a disruption of the left prefrontal cortex’s response to short sounds.  This is important since speech is made up of numerous short sounds and a person’s mastery of the subtle sounds of spoken language are related to reading ability. 

In this study, the researchers wanted to extend those findings to children.  They did this by investigating which regions of the children’s brain were active in response to rapid auditory stimuli, determining whether the activation patterns were similar in children with dyslexia and children with typically developing reading skills, determining whether these differences could be remediated, and determining whether the remediation also resulted in changes in language and reading scores.  A total of 45 children took part in this study.  The average age was 10 ½.   22 of the children had developmental dyslexia and 23 had typically developing reading skills.  All students were behaviorally and physiologically assessed.   Some students then used the Fast ForWord Language product, an intensive intervention that builds rapid auditory processing, phonological, and linguistic skills.  Fast ForWord Language, is an intensive computerized product that uses sounds and processed language to help build students’ foundational learning skills including their auditory processing skills, their memory, their attention, and their sequencing.  The version of the product that was used did not include any orthographic stimuli -- there was no text, it was all sounds and pictures. 

The students used the Fast ForWord Language product for 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for eight weeks.  The behavioral tests evaluated students’ early reading skills and reading achievement. They were: The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, and the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test.   These tests evaluated students’ ability to manipulate the sounds in language, as well as their ability to use language in general, and their ability to read and understand words, sentences, and paragraphs.   In addition to the behavioral tests, fMRI was used to measure students’ brain activity while they were doing a task unrelated to reading and language – they were listening to sounds that change in frequency, like the sound of a whistle.  The pre-tests showed that the students with dyslexia had reading skills that were significantly below the reading scores of their typically developing peers.

After using the Fast ForWord product, students’ reading and language skills were re-evaluated.   The students had made improvements in sight-word reading and passage comprehension as well as their total language skills and phonological awareness.  These improvements were statistically significant. In addition, the students’ cortical activity was re-evaluated.  In children with dyslexia, there are no regions in the brain where they have significant differences between the cortical responses to fast transitions versus the cortical responses to slow transitions. After remediation, it was found that several regions where the differences in activation increased – more similar to the activation patterns of children with typical development.  Of particular interest is left pre-frontal region – an area that has been repeatedly shown to have different processing in children with dyslexia. The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that deficits in auditory processing can compromise the ability to process rapid changes in frequency such as those that occur within phonemes, and that this impairment can lead to a deficit in the phonological processing of oral language, which can lead to a reading impairment.  These results also show that the neural circuitry of children with developmental dyslexia is plastic – it can be changed.  Effective remediation can be accomplished by focusing on improving rapid auditory processing and oral language skills and results in improved reading and language skills, as well as increased brain activity in response to rapidly changing sounds. 

For more information, please see:

Sound Training Rewires Dyslexic Children's Brains For Reading (by Nadine Gaab, Ph.D.)

Sound Training Rewires Dyslexic Children's Brains For Reading (from Science Daily)

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Categories: Brain Research, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic problems, brain development, dyslexia, fMRI, improving reading skills, reading intervention, remedial education, student reading growth

Nevada Department of Education: Fast ForWord is a “High-Gain Program”

• July 21, 2010 by Melissa Agocs

The Nevada Senate Bill 185 (SB 185) funded districts to purchase and implement innovative and remedial educational programs, materials, and strategies specific to their academic needs. 

The Nevada Department of Education commissioned the Leadership and Learning Center (LLC) to conduct an in-depth evaluation of the programs that had been purchased with SB 185 grants.  Their 2010 Interim Report includes a review of the performance of Fast ForWord products.

To quote from the Report….“Emphasis was placed on measuring student growth toward academic proficiency and mastery using state and local assessments… The analyses were completed as a result of extensive site visits, phone interviews, and an examination of two-year sets of school cohort achievement data for Criterion-Referenced Tests (CRT) for grades three through eight and High School Proficiency Exams (HSPE) for grades nine through twelve.” 

The Report closely examined CRT results at Goolsby Elementary School (which implemented Fast ForWord across all grade levels).  They concluded that each year of Fast ForWord implementation resulted in an increase in the percentage of grade-level proficient students. To quote the Report, “CRT data indicate a statistically significant increase in Reading and Writing proficiency levels…   CRT data indicate that Reading increased from 67% to 82% proficient, [and] Writing increased significantly from 55% to 82% proficient… from 2006 to 2008.”

This graph summarizes the main conclusions from the Report. The red bars represent programs that were found to have undetermined effects or low gains. Blue bars indicate high-gain programs, in which students made high gains according to the LLC standards. The green bar represents Fast ForWord, which was also found to be a high-gain program. In fact, the Report concludes that Fast ForWord products increased student reading achievement by an average of 22.2 percentage points, which was the largest average impact of all programs reviewed in the Report. The percentile scores shown in the graph represent an analysis of data from one to multiple schools using the specified product. In the case of Fast ForWord products, data from three schools were included in the analysis.

For more information, please see the Educator Briefing on this study as well as any of our 200+ additional reports on Fast ForWord results.  If you have questions about any of our research studies, please contact us.

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Categories: Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic proficiency, academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, elementary learning, elementary school learning, improving reading skills, increased test scores, innovation, learning to read, middle school learning, Nevada, remedial education, SB 185, struggling readers, struggling students, student reading growth, technology in education, writing