The 2018 BDA Committee for Dyscalculia defined dyscalculia as:
- “Dyscalculia is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers which can lead to a diverse range of difficulties with mathematics. It will be unexpected in relation to age, level of education and experience and occurs across all ages and abilities.
- Mathematics difficulties are best thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, and they have many causal factors. Dyscalculia falls at one end of the spectrum and will be distinguishable from other maths issues due to the severity of difficulties with number sense, including subitising, symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude comparison, and ordering. It can occur singly but often co-occurs with other specific learning difficulties, mathematics anxiety and medical conditions.”
In addition, the following principles have been adopted to differentiate between dyscalculia and other SpLDs (October 2021)
- The core feature of dyscalculia is a domain specific deficit in sense of number. This manifests in many ways, some of the key ones being difficulties with subitising, symbolic and non-symbolic magnitude comparison, and ordering (cardinality, ordinality). People with dyscalculia will also have a wide range of other mathematics difficulties: understanding of number and numeric relationships is essential to the development of skills in estimation, manipulation of quantities and arithmetic. Arithmetic is the first stage of mathematics teaching, so difficulties in this area are likely to have a negative impact upon subsequent mathematics learning. Dyscalculia can co-occur with other SpLDs.
- Other SpLDs do not include a deficit in sense of number, but have domain general deficits which can include language, memory, planning and sequencing, processing speed, attention, perceptual reasoning, visual-spatial skills and/or motor coordination. There is substantial evidence that these general domain deficits can potentially affect all types of learning, including mathematics.
- It is important to redress this imbalance by ensuring that difficulties with mathematics are explored appropriately within diagnostic assessments. Where those difficulties are found to have a greater impact than difficulties with literacy, assessors could note that the specific learning difficulty has a clear and specific impact upon mathematics.
What is number sense?
Number sense is seen as difficulties in the following 4 areas, as discussed at the BDA virtual maths conference, 2020
subitising: the ability to rapidly and accurately recognise the number of objects in a small group without having to count them;
non-symbolic magnitude: ability to compare objects to recognise differences in size, length, time or quantity etc… to know when amounts are larger or smaller;
symbolic magnitude: ability to compare symbols (numbers/ digits) to recognise differences in quantity and to know which is greater or less;
ordering: how many items (‘cardinality’) and position of an item or number within a series (‘ordinality’).