What is Dyscalculia?

Do you know what dyscalculia is? What would happen when someone has dyscalculia? This article would try to provide the best answers to these questions.

The information about dyscalculia will be given in several parts due to limitation of each article. As the first part of dyscalculia series, we will give you explanation about the general information and definition of dyscalculia.

To help your understanding about dyscalculia, this article is structured as follows:

• General information
• Dyscalculia definition

Through this article, optimistically you will acquire beneficial information about dyscalculia.

We wish you a very happy learning!

General Information
When someone suffers from dyscalculia, he/she usually has specific difficulties to acquire arithmetical skills. For this reason, dyscalculic people should have different educational needs compared to non-dyscalculic people.

At the moment, there is no good general awareness about dyscalculia, with guidelines and strategies aimed at helping dyscalculic people at every education stage.

By contrast, awareness of dyslexia is very widespread and there are so many strategies to help dyslexic people to cope with it. Probably, this happens because dyslexia was identified earlier than dyscalculia, so there were a lot of studies about it and therefore, dyslexia is better understood.

Dyscalculia Definition
What is dyscalculia? Someone who suffers from dyscalculia has difficulties to learn:

• Arithmetical concepts
• Arithmetical procedures

These difficulties have no relationship with sufficient educational experience. Dyscalculia should be identified since the very beginning, otherwise it will bring anxiety and low self-esteem to the sufferers due to inability to deal with math lessons.

When dyscalculic people grow older, the problem will become more complex. This happens because numeracy problems affect more negatively on job prospects. It means, there is a possibility that dyscalculia has a greater effect during adulthood.

It is estimated that the proportion of dyscalculic people is one percent to seven percent out of total population. Similar to dyslexia, different criteria are used to conduct studies about dyscalculia.

What are the causes of dyscalculia? Keep on following the dyscalculia series as we will write the answers in the upcoming articles.