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When Lainie Filkow asked her then-eight-year-old daughter what 20 minus 20 was, she thought she was giving her an easy question. But Molly?s answer?one?revealed that something wasn?t clicking in the way her brain processes numbers.
Red flags like this one, and the fact that Molly was falling behind her peers in math and having trouble focusing on her work at school, prompted her parents to get an assessment of her learning profile. It turns out, Molly has a learning disability in math, called dyscalculia. It?s a condition in which someone of average or above-average intellect has difficulty grasping basic math concepts, and the difficulty persists for at least six months.
A preschooler or young school-age kid with dyscalculia would struggle with things like understanding how quantity relates to a number (say, counting out five beads), estimating a quantity, or telling you whether eight is more or less than nine. When the child gets to grade one or two, the learning disability would manifest in struggles with basic mental arithmetic; she might still need to use her fingers to add three plus one. ?Typically, it?s pretty obvious with developmental dyscalculia because they just continue to struggle while other children pick up on fundamental concepts and skills,? says Daniel Ansari, who runs the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at Western University in London, Ont.
If you think your kid might have a learning disability in math, the first step is to talk to ...