Hello and welcome back to the What in the World is Dyscalculia podcast.
I'm your host, Dr. Honora Wall, and the podcast is presented by Educalc Learning.
Please visit us at educalclearning.com for more information about Dyscalculia and to
let us know what kind of topics you'd like to hear on future podcasts.
In today's episode, I wanted to talk about research.
I'm going to start a series covering the published research about Dyscalculia.
And the first thing I will say is that we desperately need more.
If you happen to be a researcher or if you're thinking about pursuing your terminal degree
and you want to find something fascinating to do a qualitative or even better quantitative
study on, I encourage you to look into Dyscalculia because we need to know more.
Currently, the amount of scientific published peer-reviewed research on Dyscalculia is about
10% the amount that's published on dyslexia.
And there's even less that focuses specifically on dysgraphia, dyspraxia, and how these neurodivergent
issues impact student experience and learning.
So the information that we do have is very interesting.
If you enjoy reading research, it's good stuff to read.
So I encourage you to look into that more.
And in our episodes, we'll talk about the leading researchers in the field, what they've
examined, and what they found.
I decided to use Dyscalculia as the focus area of my dissertation study because this
is such a passion of mine and I want to know more.
So I wanted to do a study that would add to what I knew and what the larger body of people
know about Dyscalculia.
I decided to focus on a quantitative study measuring data rather than measuring experience
and focus on a test accommodation.
There are so many accommodations that we use regularly in an IEP or just to help students
in need.
And those include extended time, having questions read to you, using a certain level of vocabulary,
etc.
But most of these have been examined for people with dyslexia or for people with special education
needs in general.
And that's such a broad term.
There are so many different aspects to special education.
That's a huge, huge field.
So I wanted to take an accommodation and look at it through the lens of Dyscalculia.
I chose increased blank space.
And I chose increased blank space because I wanted to know if the visual spatial issues
that are common among people with Dyscalculia would show up as a barrier to academic performance.
Part of the test too busy, too visually stimulating and overwhelming.
That was my initial interest.
And while using increased blank space can be discussed as an accommodation, there's not
a lot of research that's really looked at this topic.
So there's more to learn, certainly.
And that was one of the great things about doing a research study is I was able to look
into my initial question and come up with quite a few questions for future research
studies.
So I have many more hypotheses I'd like to consider.
But in this one, I stuck to increased blank space.
I decided to use a single case design for the research people in the audience.
If you are not a research person in the audience, that means that I just looked at one student
and examined their experience.
And a single case was very useful for my purposes, first of all, because it's a great way to
decide if an avenue is worthy of future larger research studies.
And worthy might not be a good word, but whether it's appropriate to continue the hypotheses
with a larger audience.
A single case design was also good for dyscalculia because dyscalculia affects somewhere around
10% of the population.
And if you're looking at a small school, this is a very small number of students.
And my site was a school designed specifically for people who have specific learning disorders,
high functioning autism, and ADHD.
And even then, it was a small population of students.
So doing quantitative research without enough people in the study means that you don't have
a lot of power behind your results.
So focusing on a single case design gave the study more power, more meaning to the results,
because the other variables were limited.
My participant in the study was a fifth grade student diagnosed with dyscalculia, and I
took the standard math program the school was using.
And with the publisher's permission, I had the student take some of the math test straight
out of the book, same as everyone else in the class was.
And then we had an intervention phase where I would take the test from the textbook and
just make a photocopy and split up the questions so that each page had 50% increased blank space.
I will cut to the chase of the findings.
If you want to know more about the study itself, please email me, Honora, H-O-N-O-R-A,
at educalclearning.com, and I'll be happy to email you a PDF of the study, and you can
see it in its entirety.
So what I found was that in this very limited case and in this specific situation, only
increasing blank space did not statistically change the student's academic performance.
They didn't really do a whole lot better.
They certainly didn't do any worse, but there wasn't a big change from just having that
extra space.
Now, I do think part of that result came from the fact that we did not do an intervention
phase where we taught the student how to use that space.
I was not the classroom teacher.
I was distanced from the student in that respect and simply analyzed the data that the classroom
teacher gathered, but we did not design a period of instruction showing the student how
to use increased space, showing them how to write out their work, and having them practice
that skill before they use the accommodation of increased space.
I do think that could make a difference.
The student in this study did not write a thing in that increased blank space.
So it was not utilized by the student.
And I think that was an indicator for a future intervention method if we spend time instructing
students on how to use that increased space, making them use it, practicing, reviewing
their practice, and focusing on that skill, would that then be beneficial?
I think that's a great future question.
I also analyzed the types of math topics and questions within the test.
And there was not a significant difference in performance based on how many word problems
were on any of the tests.
And there was not a significant difference based on the number of test questions.
But they all did have about the same number of questions.
So there was not a test that had longer length or a much shorter length.
They were all pretty close together.
One thing that did affect student performance was the number of questions that focused on
division, rather than multiplication, word problems, or a mixed review sort of question.
There was a definite drop in academic performance on the test that had a division focus.
So that's another future research question that I would like to address.
And I think it'd be great if more people looked at this, the inherent difficulties in the
backward parts of math, subtraction, division, roots, factoring.
So many of our math topics have a forward component and a backward component.
And in my personal experience, I have found that students with dyscalculia, even once
they've mastered the forward math, adding, multiplying, exponents, they always struggle
more with the backward component, subtraction, division, roots, et cetera.
And I think that could be a great thing to explore further.
What is it about that?
The backward piece that's causing so much difficulty.
And is it as specific to dyscalculia as I think it is?
Meaning that someone who has low numeracy, a weak math foundation, some other reason
for low performance, are they able to master both directions differently?
So that was the first statistically interesting difference.
There was a statistically significant difference.
In one very interesting area I was not expecting.
The long story short is there was one test where the student was very agitated that day,
very upset, did not want to take a math test and was showing a lot of signs of frustration.
So the teaching assistant took the child aside, put him in a separate seating area, just helped
him calm down, talked about something else, let him relax, and then prepped him for the
test by saying, you know, why don't we just get this out of the way?
You can take your test in here and that'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
You'll be done pretty soon.
And on that test, the academic performance doubled, literally doubled.
I was completely shocked at this result because we had not designed this as an event.
Certainly we did not wait for the student to become upset one day and then do this intervention.
We had not looked at social-emotional impact as part of this particular study, but certainly
after seeing this result, I'll be doing that in the future.
It does seem that having the space to calm down and having someone help the student regulate
their emotions had a massive impact on their academic performance.
Now, this test had roughly the same number of questions, roughly the same type of content,
so there was nothing else that would lead to the surprising increase in performance.
The only difference was that emotional piece.
So I'll definitely be looking at that in the future as something that can help our students
in a measurable, identifiable way.
The way we speak to people, the emotional state we put them in before they take an assessment,
can truly impact their performance in a way we can measure and certainly in a way that
we are looking for.
My educators in the audience, could you imagine if every student in your class suddenly doubled
their academic performance on tests?
That would be huge.
So that's one of the great things about research.
First of all, we can take a question and examine it and see what the results are.
In this case, I could not say that simply increasing blank space had a measurable impact
in any direction on student academic performance.
But the other great thing about research is that it leads to the next question.
Could an intervention of training students to use increased blank space properly, could
that have a measurable difference?
Helping students regulate their emotions before they take an assessment.
Could that have a measurable difference on performance?
Examining the inherent difficulties to certain types of math and seeing whether or not they
impact students with dyscalculia in a greater way than students who do not have this specific
learning disorder.
Those are all future topics I will definitely be looking into.
If any of you are doing research, please email me.
I would love to know what you're looking at and to read about your results.
So that's what happened in my dissertation study.
And again, once I have that completed, it has been defended.
I can get that up on the website, educalclearning.com.
And if you would like a copy now, please email me and I would be happy to share that with
you.
Going into research is a really great way for educators and administrators to directly
support students in a way that we know for sure works.
Takes a long time to do research.
There's a lot involved.
So using personal experience is a great way to help students right now.
And if you're seeing anything that you know for sure is helping your students, please
continue doing it.
While you wait for more research to be published.
And as a parent, this kind of research can help you understand your student better.
If you are a person who has dyscalculia, understanding what the research identifies and where the
questions are, where the answers are, can really help you understand yourself as a learner
as well.
So this is the first topic we're covering in our research series.
We won't do every single podcast episode on only research because there's a lot of personal
experience that we need to discuss about this learning disorder.
But I think it's important that we follow leading researchers in this field and see
what they have to say.
If you have something to say about what we've talked about in this podcast, please reach
out.
I would love to hear from you.
You can follow Educalclearning on LinkedIn or on Facebook or reach me through our website.
If you're interested in our Dyscalculia Specialist Certification course, you can find the link
to that on our website as well, educalclearning.com.
This is Dr. Honora Wall, and I thank you for listening to What in the World is Dyscalculia.