Arithmetic surrounds us in our everyday life, from keeping a calendar and reading time, budgeting 7 bills, shopping in stores, finding an address, following a recipe and calculating gas mileage. A person with dyscalculia has trouble with anything to do with basic arithmetic and it can severely affect their day-to-day lives. They don’t understand numbers the same way as a typical learner. For example, they don’t understand the size (magnitude) of a number and how that relates to other numbers.

Despite being as common as other learner disorders, like dyslexia, dyscalculia hasn’t received the attention or spurred the kind of research that has been seen for other learning disabilities. The neurobiology of dyslexia and effective strategies for combating that particular learning disability are well known. However, dyscalculia has had little attention paid to it in the past. Therefore, the long-term prognosis for children with dyscalculia isn’t fully understood. Which strategies are most effective and what the long-term results are from those strategies aren’t known for sure either.

The above video shows a child working though simple math problems with exceeding struggle. This is what students with dyscalculia face every day, and thus require more attention and one on one help with an educator to fully understand and be able to understand concepts

Neurological Defects

A dysfunction in one of the hemispheres of the brain can cause dyscalculia. MRI studies have shown that dyscalculic individuals have abnormalities in the part of the brain that is normally used for calculations, especially the intraparietal sulcus. Individuals who are 24 dyscalculic try to compensate by using other parts of the brain in an inefficient way. When the dyscalculic student also has another learning disorder, like dyslexia, more parts of the brain are underdeveloped or abnormal and compound the dyscalculia.