Hello and welcome to the What in the World is Dyscalculia? podcast.
I'm your host, Honora Wall, and today I would like to talk about the Dyscalculia diagnosis.
How do you get one?
What does it tell you?
Why are they so hard to find?
There's a lot of reasons why it can be difficult for people to get diagnosed with Dyscalculia.
I'm hoping we can get to all of them in today's podcast, but it's such a big topic, I'm sure
we'll come back to it in future episodes as well.
I'm going to start with the best way to get a diagnosis, which is to have a neuropsychological
evaluation done by a professional.
Now these evaluations have to be done by a trained psychologist, educational psychologist,
neuropsychologist, or a psychologist who specializes in these kind of tests.
In this evaluation, a student will have a general IQ test and a number of subtests that
look at visual spatial, levels, working memory, processing speed, reading abilities, mathematical
abilities, writing, problem solving, a wide variety of issues, and you will be given a
scale, a score, and a percentile.
We'll talk about what those mean in detail in future podcasts because testing is a really
rich, interesting, involved field.
The reason why it's hard for people to get a Dyscalculia evaluation done like this is
because they're expensive.
Not a lot of people do them, and you have to either pay out of pocket, which could be
thousands of dollars, or have your local public school handle the testing through a local
testing center or an educational psychologist on staff.
Many schools today are using a response to intervention program, and the response to intervention
program doesn't always lead to the need for an evaluation.
Whether or not your school district uses RTIs, response to intervention, and whether or not
those RTIs lead to further testing is a conversation you need to have with your school district.
Maybe keep an eye on who's involved in your local school administration, who's the superintendent,
who makes those decisions, and how well-versed are they in federal law, covering disabilities,
and what is their process.
You can find all of that out through your local public school.
In a perfect world, I love it when people come in with a neuropsycheval because I
have tons of data and I know exactly where a student has the strengths and weaknesses,
and where we can play off of their strengths, and how we can best support their weaknesses.
Many RTI programs sadly don't give us that kind of data.
We only know where a student struggles, and we know what kind of interventions may have
helped.
But we don't really know why, and we don't know at what level a problem exists.
If you can get a neuropsycheval, you're going to look for the mathematical scores
that come back on those tests.
Typically you're going to find that scores are done on a percentile, and your student
could be in the 25th percentile, the 30th percentile, 60th percentile, etc.
These are not a percentage score, and again in a future podcast we'll talk about that
difference, but they tell you how your student compared to other students of their same age
and grade who took that same test.
Typically we want to see scores in the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile.
Those are very what we call average, run of the mill scores where we expect most people
to land.
It's when we get above that 60th percentile, and truly the 75th percentile and up.
Now we're looking at above average performance, and when we get to the 30th percentile, and
especially the 25th percentile, that's when we're seeing a performance that shows a weakness.
And if that weakness is in math, then a dyscalculia diagnosis is appropriate.
You might wonder why the 25th versus the 30th.
That's a great question.
There's not a huge difference between the 25th and 30th percentile as far as number
of questions right.
The difference really comes down to how the test giver interpreted those scores.
And some psychologists take a 25th percentile as a dyscalculia or a specific learning disorder
diagnosis.
And that is a very conservative number.
And it can keep some students out of getting services.
Thirty percentile is a very standard cutoff for diagnosing someone with dyscalculia.
We see that a lot in research studies.
The quantitative and qualitative research about dyscalculia usually includes students
who score at the 30th percentile or below.
Now for a neuropsych eval, the difference between 25th and 30th percentile is really
just an interpretation of the scores.
Psychologists don't want to give a diagnosis that is unnecessary.
And once we take people in the 30th percentile, we can get false positives.
We can get people who seem to have a learning disorder.
Maybe they just have low numeracy and that can be fixed with interventions.
Maybe they are an English language learner and they're still getting the handle on the
vocabulary and that influence their test scores.
Maybe it's a processing speed issue but not a mathematical concept issue.
So it's a gray area if your psychologist uses 25th or 30th percentile as their diagnosis
cutoff.
Of course talking about evaluations can be much more involved and we'll take a deep dive
into those and I'll talk about some of the evaluations I've seen from students I've worked
with in other podcasts.
Today I want to talk about the other ways students can be diagnosed or not with dyscalculia.
A second way is to look at students' performance in school.
Typically we say that if a student performs two grade levels below their peers, that should
qualify them for a diagnosis of dyscalculia.
But this is very unofficial and your school may or may not use that as a reference point.
It also doesn't tell us why and whether or not the problem is low numeracy or if there's
an actual problem in the parietal lobe which happens for students with dyscalculia.
You might also find that your student is performing behind their peers but the school says that
they have a math learning disability but not dyscalculia.
In that case I would encourage you to encourage your school to check out the Department of
Education website, federal law and the federal Department of Education has been very, very
clear.
The name of the math learning disability is dyscalculia.
There's no difference, no difference, that's what it is, whatever we call it, that's what
it is.
So I do hate to see students not receive services because they're told that they have a math
learning disability but that it's not dyscalculia.
That's just not true.
And hopefully with more awareness we'll have more services available and more of an understanding.
And you're going to find that a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and principals have
not heard of dyscalculia.
We just need more awareness.
We need more people talking about this disorder.
We need more people sharing accurate scientific research based information and there are plenty
of great websites where you can find out that information including mine, educalclearning.com.
But don't stop there.
Keep going and do your research with lots of websites and find out everything that you
can and then share that knowledge.
That's how we're going to really make a difference for our students.
Okay so two ways to diagnose dyscalculia.
First a neuropsych eval that brings back mathematical scores in the 25th to 30th percentile.
That's the best way because it gives us the most comprehensive specific data.
Another way is to perform math two grade levels below your peers.
That shows a real difference in a concerning way.
That's an overall difference not just one bad math test score but over time having that
lower performance.
Another way that we typically include people in research studies as having dyscalculia
is to look at their performance on standardized tests.
And we're looking there for a difference, an unexpected difference that does not match
peers when they take standardized tests.
Then the problem with that model is that we really don't know why the student had a low
test score.
Were they having a bad day at the time they took that particular test?
Is this the first time they've ever seen that test?
And the questions were unusual or they were asked in a strange way or the vocabulary was
not accessible.
There's a million reasons why a person can have a low score on a standardized test.
And those really show one brief moment of time so they can be helpful but they're not
comprehensive.
Okay but these are the three ways that we usually look to see whether or not we can
diagnose a student with dyscalculia.
Of course parents and teachers suspect that there's an issue long before we get this kind
of data in and then we work with the data we get.
I know a lot of parents also are resistant to having any kind of diagnosis because they
don't want to label for their child.
And I can understand that I'm a parent too and we're very protective of our kids.
The thing I would encourage parents to remember is that getting an accurate diagnosis is really
the same as having an accurate eyeglass prescription.
When students need help, they need help and having the best amount of information is the
best way to get them the help that they deserve and that they are guaranteed by law.
Equal equitable access to education.
And that's really important.
So if you are on the fence about having your child tested, I would encourage you to really
think about that.
Talk with some other parents who have been through the process.
Talk with some teachers and school administrators and see what they say about it and remember
that you're not labeling your child.
You're helping them get access to the resources that they need and deserve.
And then parents make your best decision with that information once you get that.
Parents I know that a lot of times we get nervous about dyscalculia before we get a
diagnosis because we notice that our student is struggling so much for years and the interventions
aren't helping, the RTI model isn't really making progress, we don't see growth, we see
the same problems that they learn math and then forget it.
Basic facts are not memorized, which honestly is fine.
Memorization is a parlor trick, but it can make it easier to complete math work faster
if you have things memorized.
For students with dyscalculia that's not going to happen.
So we want to let that go and get them support tools instead.
And when we see children have these continuing struggles then it really impacts their self-esteem
and their self-confidence and they stop thinking about themselves as mathematical thinkers.
So we can see those sorts of behavioral problems whether or not we have a specific diagnosis.
So you're going to see some actions and behaviors from your child and you know if they're having
a really serious long-term issue versus did they have one bad day versus are they having
one or two tough math topics.
It's pretty clear where your student is ending up if you pay attention to those things.
And I know a lot of people around the country are having a hard time getting an official
diagnosis and getting that evaluation done.
The best I can tell you is to keep pushing, keep advocating for your child, keep asking
questions, keep talking to schools, to the administration, to the superintendent, go
to school board meetings, get involved and talk to some local psychologists, see if they're
taking clients for testing and how much they charge, it can be pricey but make those phone
calls and find out what you can do.
And don't give up.
Don't let it slide.
It's better to know than not know.
And having a diagnosis will open up doors to the interventions and accommodations that
your student needs.
I'd love to see that happen for elementary school kids because we can get them on the
right track early.
It's great if it can happen in middle school because there's still a lot of school left
and we want to have the help.
If you have not gotten one before high school, keep pushing because if you don't have accommodations
and you are not using accommodations in high school, then you're going to have a hard time
or it'll be impossible to get those accommodations recognized for SATs, ACTs, to bring those
IEPs and evaluations with you to college.
Super important.
We will have future podcasts where we talk about the college problem because holy cannoli
is it a big one.
If you think K-12 is hard for people with dyscalculia, wait until we talk about higher
education.
So if you've gotten the documentation for your child in the K-12 system, you'll have
a leg up when you get into higher education.
So that was a lot of information in this podcast today and there's a lot more to be said about
each of these parts, the RTI, the standardized tests, neuropsych evals, what you know as a
parent and what you see in your students' behavior.
So we will talk about all of that on different episodes.
For today, I'm really glad that you listened in.
I hope you got some good information.
If you have specific questions, I would love to answer them in a podcast episode.
Please reach out to me at Honora, H-O-N-O-R-A at educalclearning.com.
Go to my website, educalclearning.com, leave a message there.
Find me on LinkedIn.
Educalc Learning has a LinkedIn page and a Facebook page.
And let me know what's on your mind and I will be happy to get you the most up to date
current scientifically accurate information that I possibly can.
I'm Honora Wall.
This is the What in the World is Dyscalculia podcast and thank you for listening.
Talk soon.