Dyscalculia is a congenital condition that affects an individual’s ability to acquire and perform mathematical tasks. It is a lifelong condition, and here is a Numberphile YouTube video on it.They say 3-6% of people have it!
I read a pretty long academic paper, or five, on the condition, it’s identification and possible “treatments” (awful word choice by the academics, imo). Funnily enough, when seen through the eyes of technology-integration, a large amount of the “treatments” fell into things I do anyways for all of my students.
Here is a list of things, you can imagine how without tech these things might require a lot of work especially just for a few students. Imagine applying this stuff to paper worksheets:
- Offer students the use of Microsoft Teams Immersive Reader
- Use sans serif fonts as a default.
- Use “dark mode“
- Format your content nicely, or copy/paste other content into a new doc
- Use bullet points
- Don’t justify paragraphs
- Add whitespace with page breaks or extra space between paragraphs
- Add hyperlinks
- Add images (PowerPoint auto designer is awesome for this btw)
- Allow students individual access to documents, so they can review at their own pace. The Teams “Assignments” function does this really well.
- Encourage note-taking directly on the study materials; once again “Assignments” is useful to get each student their own copy of the lesson doc that you can later review.
Finally, just raise awareness in class over learning difficulties, so that students can self-advocate for themselves.
Credits:
- Words by James Simpson
- Images by Thufir running DiffusionBee
