What is at the Core?

This YouTube video addresses the question: "What is at the core of dyscalculia? What is the central issue with math learning disabilities?"

video Transcript:

"What is at the core of having a math learning disability?"

Oftentimes I hear people saying, "Oh, my student doesn't know how to do their multiplication tables or they don't understand fractions." And it's true that it looks like these are the problem areas, but really, dyscalculia goes all the way back to lacking a sense of numbers and quantities.

They lack a sense and an understanding of what numbers are, or what their relationship is with other numbers… or another way to say that might be, a “lack of number sense.” You may lack a sense of how this looks visually. How does a five look different than a ten? And what is the relationship between five and ten?

So if you have a hard time understanding that, and you don't have an innate or intrinsic sense of number, it's going to make a lot of topics in math very difficult. So that's going to make fractions hard, that's going to make multiplication tables hard, your math facts hard. A lot of subject. It goes all the way back to lacking that sense of number.

Some experts [Brian Butterworth and Dorian Yeo] call it a lack of understanding numbers as sets, or groups. And that's just another way to say, lacking a sense of quantity.

This can be hard to explain because if you are not dyscalculic, you have an innate sense for numbers. Brian Butterworth even talks about how many animals have an innate sense for numbers and quantity. But dyscalculics don't.

So some of the supports and ways we can help our dyscalculic community members is understanding what that core problem goes back to. And if students want to address that problem, teachers can help them by understanding and gaining that sense of number back at the very core, the very foundation of math.