Hello and welcome to What in the World is Dyscalculia, the podcast that is all about
the math learning disability.
I'm your host, Dr. Honora Wall.
And What in the World is Dyscalculia is sponsored by EduCalc Learning.
You can learn more about Dyscalculia at educalclearning.com.
And I encourage you also to visit www.thedtri.org, the Dyscalculia Training and Research Institute,
which is a non-profit that is dedicated to promoting awareness and understanding and
hopefully soon research into the math learning disability.
We've got some free brochures for students and some infographics for teachers and parents
on that website and you can feel free to grab those, download them, share them so that we
get the awareness out there.
Now in today's episode I wanted to talk about the strangest accommodation for Dyscalculia
that I think I have ever heard.
I'm not going to call out the state that is currently using this accommodation because
I just heard about it so I don't know if it is district specific or if it is statewide.
And until I learn more, no sense putting out misinformation.
Here's what I do know.
I have a student in elementary school with a Dyscalculia diagnosis and her accommodation
that she's allowed to use for state testing is an abacus.
Now an abacus is a great tool and I think it's a wonderful enrichment activity but for
an accommodation that really makes me question the usefulness of this tool.
Partly because I don't know how a student is supposed to use an abacus and get through
the number of questions that would be included in a very long and involved state test.
I also don't know of any student of any age who wants to lift a large, heavy, loud, clanging,
colorful wooden bead abacus and put it on their desk in a classroom full of their peers.
So it might have been great for a Tang Dynasty tax collector but I'm not sure it's such
a good idea for a third grader who's trying to take a test in a room full of other students.
So sometimes a tool is a great benefit but that doesn't make it a great accommodation.
We have to include all of the students experience when we're choosing accommodations and the
correct accommodations for Dyscalculia really involve using tactile methods of counting,
counting on their fingers, counting with objects, counting with a program like TouchMath.
Some people like using a 10 blocks or the 1 unit blocks while they're counting, adding
and subtracting.
And then as students progress in age and in grade level, letting them use a 1 to 100 chart,
letting them use a multiplication list, letting them use a calculator.
These are appropriate tools at different stages of math understanding, math development, and
really give students the space to in the classroom focus on the lesson and then confirm their
basic fact answers.
There's a number of ways you can use these without them being a crutch or replacing understanding
how to add, subtract, multiply, or divide.
And I'll briefly talk about those.
In early childhood education and early elementary school, we're still building our
approximate number system.
We're still building an understanding of what counting is, what combining numbers is,
through adding or subtracting.
And we need to reinforce that through as many tactile external concrete experiences as possible.
If every early elementary and early childhood program threw out their worksheets and let
students do everything by hand, I think that I could reasonably retire by the time today's
third graders got out of college because we could avoid a lot of the problems that happen
to students with dyscalculia when we give them the extra time to develop that internal
skill and that understanding through external tactile means.
Once we get into third grade, the number of topics we're putting into the school year
and the number of problems we expect students to solve, it's just not really feasible to
do that work with those ineffective or sometimes called immature, those different methods of
combining things.
That's why we need to move on to the 1 to 100 chart, the multiplication list, those old-fashioned
time staples, and then by the end of third grade and above, using a calculator.
You can still have students add, subtract, multiply or divide one place value digit at
a time.
They don't have to put the whole problem into the calculator.
You can still have them practice the algorithm of carrying and borrowing and multiplying
multiple digits or doing long division, but they can focus on that algorithm, those steps
and procedures, while using a tool to check those basic facts.
That way they're still getting the answer right.
They're still getting the problem solved.
They're still getting through their work.
It's still going to take them longer than students without dyscalculia.
Now what if you have students who don't truly have a learning disability that just have
low numeracy or a weak foundation or something else that's kept them from progressing?
Well, they're going to move along, memorize their basic facts, strengthen that retrieval,
and they're going to move away from using the accommodations.
Let that happen at the student's time.
Now the students who have a math learning disability are not going to move away from
those accommodations.
And as we get past fourth grade, we really want to keep the multiplication list because
you can use that to multiply, divide, list factors, list multiples, simplify fractions,
write fractions with like denominators so that you can add and subtract them.
There's a ton of work we get out of that multiplication list.
And then we also want to use a calculator.
It's not made of lava, folks.
It's just a technology tool.
Now in our current school system, we have a lot of students who have to learn how to
do coding at a very early age.
This is considered an enrichment activity.
It does not make sense to think that students are capable and should be excited about computer
programming software, oh, and also not be allowed to touch a calculator, a basic four
operation, or a TIX 30A, inexpensive, easy to use.
These are just tools.
Let's give students the right tools to use to support their work.
And let's not be afraid of that.
Let's think about our internal bias, what we think math learning should look like.
And what do we do for students who learn differently and perform math differently?
That's really an us problem, not a them problem.
So I guess to wrap up a lot of this talk about accommodations.
There's some great research that's already published and out there about increasing tactile
concrete external experiences for counting that are very beneficial for younger students.
An excellent tool for early intervention.
Let's also be aware that as students get older, and I'm talking by third grade, they're
very well aware if they are different from the other kids in the class or not.
We don't want to keep exposing them and have their weaknesses exposed.
They're not going to use their accommodations if they feel embarrassed.
And then they're not going to learn.
And that's truly our end result, is to help students learn math.
So let's focus on that end goal.
And let's make sure that our accommodations match the work that is happening.
And what I mean by that is if we're going through a lot of topics in a short amount of
time, or if we expect students to answer a large number of problems, which students with
dyscalculia are completely capable of doing, they just need more time, then let's give
them the tools to make those goals and objectives get met in a timely fashion.
Let's also remember that as math progresses, we're focusing more on the problem solving
concepts, steps, and procedures, and the rules of how we work to solve math problems.
So the days of basic fact memorization should be behind us.
That doesn't mean that the current work should be behind our students.
It just means they should use the right tool to help them get that work done.
So analyze your accommodations, see what you're offering students, and really think about what
objectives are those accommodations meeting.
And for students with dyscalculia, the accommodations are there to help support the fact that their
parietal lobe loses math information over time.
This includes basic fact retrieval, and it includes problems with remembering steps and
procedures and place value and all the things we talk about in the different episodes.
Okay, that wraps up this podcast, but I encourage you to visit educalclearning.com or the dtri.org
for more information.
You can email me, honora@educalclearning.com.
You can also find me through honora@thedtri.org, and I'm happy to get you some more information
about the math learning disability dyscalculia so that you can support your students, your
children, and yourself.
Thank you for listening to What in the World is Dyscalculia.
I'm Dr. Wall, and I will see you again soon.