Dyscalculia Research

There was a report a couple of weeks ago (the NCETM report links other reports) that research shows that dyscalculia may be more common in schoolchildren than dyslexia. This is quite a revolutionary idea. If it is true, and people take up on it, we can expect big changes in the way that maths is taught.

First however some background. The research was carried out on 1500 primary schoolchildren in Cuba and shows that between 3 and 6 percent screened positive, as opposed to "the 2.5 to 4.3 percent who have dyslexia." I think these are dyslexia in the UK figures. The research used a screener devised by Brian Butterworth - more information about him here, and details of his published screener here. Brian Butterworth is evidently one of our leading experts on the subject, and the screener is meticulous in its definition of dyscalculia and in its efforts to exclude other causes for maths deficit. The screener is only normed up to the age of 14 and it is only a screener and exhorts its users to look at other causes before making a diagnosis.

The reports of the research do raise a lot of questions. Why Cuba? Were the schoolchildren also screened for dyslexia? (If not, the comparison with dyslexia is far from convincing.) Did the researchers look for other contributing causes? Was the screener similar to the published one?

I've always thought of dyscalculia as a comparatively rare condition, relating to difficulty with conceptualising numerical information. I've met a few, but only a few, people like that in my years of teaching. What I don't think it is includes:

• disliking maths
• not understanding maths after bad teaching
• dyslexia - a lot of dyslexics have difficulty with maths
• memory difficulties - cannot hold how to do things

You'd want to filter these things out, especially the dyslexia. Someone who cannot learn tables, or gets confused between multiplication and division, or tries to take the top number from the bottom one in a written sum, or confuses median and mean, and so on, most likely does not have dyscalculia.

Of course if the research proves to be true I may need to change my opinion. But I may find that all that has happened is that the definition of dyscalculia has changed.

E-Book on Literacy and Dyslexia

Hugo Kerr’s highly recommended chapter on dyslexia from “The Cognitive Psychology of Literacy Teaching: Reading, Writing, Spelling, Dyslexia (& a bit more besides)” brings me back to the ongoing debate, at least in my mind, about the “reality” of dyslexia.

Hugo is truly sceptical about dyslexia, without going quite as far as to suggest that it doesn’t exist. I might have agreed more fully a few years ago, though I would never have read the amazing quantity of literature quoted, which covers the field. In those days I really was more anti-dyslexia, I believed that it didn't matter to the way I delivered my teaching; I wondered about trying to put those views into order. Looking back now, I remember a few people in particular who came to me for help with spelling, but their needs were great and they never seemed to make as much progress as others.

Now I feel I am more of a believer. I have written in this blog before here and here ideas around the definition of dyslexia. From Hugo’s quoted definitions I am probably closest to the Moray House definition; I certainly do not like the idea of the primacy of reading or literacy difficulty.

I wonder about the other, perhaps secondary, “symptoms” of dyslexia, which include:

• Memory difficulties
• Organisational difficulties
• Difficulties listening to two people at once
• Mis-saying words
• Difficulties with maps
• Difficulties with maths

I wonder about the idea, in Cynthia Klein for one, of difficulties with different sorts of processing, motor, auditory and visual, and the different sorts of literacy problems consequent; I have done these analyses and find them useful.

I wonder about the continuum, about dyspraxia and dyscalculia.

I wonder above all about all those people I have worked with who find great relief in the diagnosis of dyslexia; once it is accepted, there can be release from the anxieties remaining from school and there can be a new addressing of current priorities. As a support tutor I can move away if desired from teaching spelling to supporting writing and expression.

In the UK the diagnosis of dyslexia is crude and unsatisfying, and open to abuse. However it is very often needed for funding to ensure support, and therefore necessary.

I found the book from Maggie Harnew's site, as so often. I'll read more of it, when I can find when I get used to the idea of an e-book - I don't find it easy on a landscape monitor.

Read The Words

I've added a link to Read the Words to the Dyslexia Resources page on the Skills for Life Website. I know that dyslexic people sometimes use or are recommended software to turn text into speech. This is a free version and might be attractive if you don't want to use it a lot. I find the slurs between words difficult sometimes, but a dyslexic student pointed out that you have to learn to use software like this so that you become used to its peculiarities; I don't need to use it so I am not a good judge. Just don't try to read a web page from the url; cut and paste the text instead. I can see how this could be a really useful tool.

Another purpose of the site is to embed speech on your web page, so here goes.


It sounds pretty good to me, though I did have to switch to Internet Explorer to get the embedding to work.

MindMeister

A little more on MindMeister which I mentioned yesterday. I've used it this last couple of days for assignment planning with a student who has used both Inspiration and Bubbl.us. We have used it in three ways, us both sitting at a single computer, us both sitting at adjacent computers and both updating different sections, such as me correcting spelling, and from home with her updating and me changing layout after she has finished editing. The finished maps look great. They can be printed very easily to pdf, which may leave quite small print on a large map. The rtf print option is useful too for making notes for putting things in order if your plan is leading to an essay or assignment. You can compare the output with one I produced with bubbl.us, and posted here. You can centre the embedded map below with your mouse. The one drawback I have seen is that you can only have six maps with the free version.

Being Dyslexic

I added a link to Being Dyslexic to the Dyslexia Information Sites page yesterday. The site has been around for a few years and gets a lot of traffic. The site was set up by a dyslexic adult, it contains a vast amount of information and has a very active forums section. I do however have some reservations.

With so much information from so many sources, it is inevitable that some of it is conflicting. As a tutor working with dyslexic learners I am looking for clear information which is reliable, both for myself and to point others towards. Because the underlying cause of dyslexia is unclear, dyslexia is defined through its symptoms and diagnosis tends to be restrained, even tentative. Yet when I am working with someone who is dyslexic I have no doubts about it. When a learner displays a symptom I think (or say) that that is the dyslexia coming through. It is quite different from working with someone who is not dyslexic, although there is also a category of people who might be dyslexic.

Unfortunately one of the first statements I came across on the forums was that dyslexia is about difficulties with reading, writing and spelling and that is the sum of it. I have read this online in several places in the past few weeks. And it is a statement which I find very untrue. I would try to define dyslexia as being something which has a number of characteristic symptoms and these include difficulties with reading, writing and spelling. Other symptoms such as short term memory difficulties, difficulties processing sounds, organisational difficulties are just as significant, if not always so apparent, and are also used in diagnosis.

The reason I feel a need to bring this up again is that dyslexia remains a controversial subject and is liable to enquiry by the media. We have seen writers such as Julie Birchill and Peter Hutchins cause backlash and outrage in recent weeks, as elements of the media seek to undermine the legal right to recognition and support. What we need is clarity and discretion.

New Website Quizzes

I've added a few Beauty Therapy quizzes linked from the Quizzes page.

As might be guessed I wrote them for a particular student who is struggling with remembering the names of muscles and arteries. I try all sorts of things, especially mnemonics, so I am trying Hot Potatoes quizzes with her to see if it works. She enjoys doing them, but she hasn't learned the words yet. If I have them on the web, I am acting in accordance with the software licence and will have them there the next time I need them. They may be useful for someone else. I get this quite a lot with students I support, where they are asked to remember wonderful, impossible names for a level 2 NVQ; another example is where Horticulture students have to learn the Latin names of plants. I did Latin so the names of these muscles mean a little bit to me. They don't mean much to my Somali student.

Mind Maps

Here is a new Web 2.0 tool from Bubbl.us - quick and easy mind maps that you can edit collaboratively over the web. The product is at an early stage and there is not a lot of functionality, and maybe it will stay simple. As I see it you can only share to people you nominate as a friend with their email; you cannot post a link. You can however embed and I've put one below. I like to use mind maps to plan things with learners, especially dyslexic learners. I also use them to demonstrate things to be learned like this example. It's Flash based and takes time to load. It prints well, but really needs a colour printer. It's free of course and readily accessible.

Additions 9th March

I've added links for the following:

• I found a link to dyslexics.org on a blog I have been following - I Speak of Dreams, particularly the post on Theories on the Cause of Dyslexia. Both writers are what I would call sober on dyslexia; they are concerned that dyslexia should be understood in a way that includes a scientific understanding. Theories on the Cause of Dyslexia refers to the idea that we can expect that more than one cause of dyslexia will prove to be the case when we have full understanding. This page on dyslexics.org refers to the myths of dyslexia and suggests that a lot of the problems that dyslexic people have are caused by bad teaching early on - this in a week when inspectors have criticized literacy standards in nursery education. A lot of misunderstanding is caused by focusing so much on the idea that dyslexia is poor reading skills, rather than that poor reading skills is one symptom of dyslexia, exacerbated in countries with difficult spelling patterns.

• I have started to put resources I use to teach what I call underpinning numeracy skills for people to learn in preparation for the end tests in to one place. At the moment this is on a wiki page which I can update easily wherever I am. Eventually I will incorporate it on the site along with the Spellsheets page and other similar sets. At the moment it mainly includes my own resources (quizzes and pdfs) and stuff from Skillswise. Although the site is mainly about online learning, there are some points where I need to organise paper-based resources as well. At the moment this is linked from the End Tests page.

• I have gone over the word lists in the spellsheets and changed fonts into sans serif ones for easier reading with my learners.
  

Dyslexia Scotland

On the Friday I added a link to Dyslexia Scotland to the Dyslexia Information page. What impressed me most is that it's a beautifully designed site. It contains all the usual dyslexia information with all the Scotland specific information you would expect. It incorporates the Textic toolbar so cleanly it seems part of the design - it probably was. The links to Readspeaker are very clear. The whole design has been worked out wonderfully. The British Dyslexia Association site also uses Textic and also has the Textic talk toolbar for sound, but inevitably they could not redesign the site to incorporate these.

I played around with the Textic bar when it first came out, but rarely had the opportunity to use it with dyslexic learners. It's a great idea and I would recommend dyslexic people to pay for the Word bar. I'm not so sure about the Internet Explorer bar - I mostly abandoned Internet Explorer about a year ago, and they do not yet have a bar for Firefox. I don't know if anyone has gone for a whole college approach to Textic - I imagine the limitations and costs would be complex. The website way can be effective. With public websites having to make themselves accessible under the DDA, there is a lot of scope for clean design and tools like this to help poor readers.

I also played around with text and background colours a few years ago on this page. I try to do handouts on coloured pages and use sans serif fonts like Arial and Verdana, but I'm not a great fan of Comic Sans (not available on this blog). I've tried Arial and Verdana on this post as well

Numeracy Teaching

I saw a presentation on Thursday which included a section which showed written mistakes that a dyslexic student might make doing written calculations.

I was struck by how rarely I come across people doing sums like this on paper. My current role includes supporting apprentices to pass Level 1 or Level 2 tests. I can only think of two of those students who regularly did calculations on paper, and one of those was one of the few dyscalculics (does that word exist?) I have come across, and he could not hold a sum in his head. Of the others, few have wanted to do calculations on paper and they have been relieved when I started to offer them alternative strategies.

Being a good FE teacher I write learning plans and lesson plans and try to code these to the Core Curriculum. Normally I support the Core Curriculum, though I strongly believe we should teach other things as well. But it is not easy to code mental arithmetic to the curriculum. There is however a whole section at the level I usually teach (N1/L1.3) about written methods. Luckily my students do not have to demonstrate that they can use efficient written methods. And why should they have to? Numeracy is about everyday maths in practical situations - the only real world place you will be presented with a sum is in a maths class.

Most maths books, maths websites, maths worksheets, numeracy worksheets, etc, etc, demonstrate numeracy skills by written methods, which renders most of them useless for teaching purposes, although they may have useful practice questions. Even the wonderful Maths the Basic Skills Curriculum Edition does this. An honourable exception is Skillswise which has good sections on mental maths.