Teach the Brain Forums

I know a very smart child who has excellent grades in all his courses except in math. His parents say that he makes an effort to study math as much as for other courses. He is just 8 years old. Is this normal? Do you think that his math underperfomance could be related to a brain problem?

Last weekend I read a great article about math difficulties on this website. Sorry I can't tell you just how I find it. There is so much good information here that I can spend hours reading and forget where I've been. Anyway if I am correct, there may be a problem with number sense. I hope that you can find the article because it made a lot of sense. Underlying the problem comes from the child not understanding the basis of what are numbers and what do they represent. The article explains that simultainously a child must understand that the number, for example five, must recogniz e the symbol 5, the spelling five, and the concept of five. I hope that you can find the article and will report back to this forum what you learn. I am very interested. Cathy

To Cathy and Brian,

Brian, it sounds as though the child you are talking about may be dyscalculic. Dyscalculia is the equivalent of dyslexia for maths. However, unlike dyslexia, it is very understudied.

Dyscalculia definitions and tests vary from country to country. The terminology used even differs, eg. in the US, it is known as "mathematical disabilities". In England, there is a national test, the "Dyscalculia Screener" by Brian Butterworth. In France, orthophonists perform their own custom tests. In the USA, your local school psychologist will test the child and decide if he or she qualifies as having a specific learning disability in math.

Cathy, you probably read an article about the symposium on remediation software for dyscalculia (which OECD is funding the development of), you can find the article again by going to "Brain and Learning" from the main page and scrolling down, or just click here.

If you want to learn more about dyscalculia, you can visit Brian Butterworth's webpage at http://www.mathematicalbrain.com.

And the OECD team will shortly be putting up more information about dyscalculia on this website, so stay tuned!

Anna Wilson.

We would like to welcome Anna Wilson our online scientific expert in numeracy and the brain.
Please send direct more questions and comments to her on maths teaching and the brain via this forum.

Thank you Anna, that was the article I was thinking about. Can you provide any further details as to when the remedial software will be ready? Cathy

We will firstly have remedial tools for attention training and word building up in the next 6-8 weeks hopefully. This will shortly be followed by remedial game for dyscalculics called "The Number Race". This will first be available in French and thereafter will be translated and adapted into English and other languages.

One of my concerns in teaching math is the area of problem solving. It is the expectation of my state's standards that fourth graders will solve "story" problems and explain their answers in writing.
I have seen a great deal of good change in how and what we teach as a result of these standards. However, the greatest increase in scores has been with the white population, who have grown up living in the US. I teach in a school that has given me students of many different backgrounds - E.g. children coming from Korea, Mexico, Italy, and African countries. These children do not have learning disorders, in fact, they are quite bright and socially sound. But, teaching them strategies in looking for a pattern, guess and check, making a list, etc. is very difficult. They don't seem to get the intent of the question. I have come to believe that for many of these children it is because they don't relate with the circumstances. For others, they have been taught to do things in their head and not provide their logic. Others simply have a unique system of finding logic.
With so much tied into the scores of these children, teachers like myself are questioning the validity of the problem solving strands in the standards. We all know that all children need to have problem solving strategies, however, is there any research that would imply that solving math problems requires different neurological processing in children of different cultures? Is there a basis in thinking that all children have that we can base our strategies on? How do other countries teach these skills?thank you for your thoughts.

It seems as though we have similar state mandated benchmarks in the area of word problems in Michigan. Intially I worried about it because often dyslexic students excelled in math where they didn't have to worry about reading. It seemed as though these poor students were being given another subject to feel like failures in! Then there were the students from other languages who could compute numbers but not speak the language.... what a mess!
I don't know if Viet Nam still teaches math this way, but, at least years ago, the elementary years were spent learning different word problem solving skills. The children were given many strategies to solve a variety of problems.
In Japan, children are given an equation and then asked to develop a rule to explain how the answer was derived. I wonder how this method could be incorporated into a classroom where a common language is part of the challenge to teaching?
Part of the reason I am looking forward to the changes in IDEA is that it is possible that some of your students will qualify for special assistence. Have you asked your special ed teacher for some strategies that are used for LD kids. Part of the reason why I like to research special education teaching strategies is that there are many strategies that can be used in general ed. I'm sorry but I don't have any answers about those strategies as your delimna has motivated me to start researching math as I may one day be faced with a class like yours. Cathy

Thank you, Cathy, for your insightful response. I am very interested in hearing about Japan and Vietnam. I have a Vietnamese student, also.
I have a great deal of support at my school. We have class sizes of 23, a full time ESL teacher,two full time ESL assistants, one full time Title One teacher, and a full time resource room teacher. And, many others who volunteer. So, these children have a lot of support, as do I. However, it's what do we do with this support? How do we teach children with limited English skills to compete and be successful with our language governed assessments? I know the kids appreciate having people they can talk to and communicate with, and they do much better working on problem solving skills in small groups. But, they still are expected to do the math independently at test time. And this just isn't happening. Then, we get this huge discreptancy in scores, and there lies the problem. It would be great if we could measure the progress they make instead of what they can do at test time. It would be great if we could allow children a window of time to be successful. It would be great if we could ask children to discuss out loud what the problem is, and have them talk their way through it. these techniques work on a daily basis, but they aren't able to transfer them over into the testing environment. In fact, that's "cheating".
I've come to accept that assessments will be here at least as long as I continue to teach. But, I would like to have a more fair playing field in this global world. Since many countries require English to be taught in their schools, and it is becoming more and more relied upon to communicate, we really need to get on board and play fair.

I don't know if this may help, but have you contacted the Federal Department of Education? I e-mailed a question earlier about accomodations for ESL students that could be granted under either IDEA or No Child Left Behind. It will be interesting to learn their response given that ESL students can get accomodated for their lack of ability to read in english and the problem in math is related to that.
Your description about how your students are allowed to talk their way through solving problems raised some questions in my mind. I have observed that children in general seem to have a problem with test taking. I have wondered if there is a difficulty in transfering the method of information retrieval used when working on the material during the lesson to taking tests. I have observed children who know the information being tested but when it comes to answering the question on the test, they can't give the correct response. I wonder if there is a better way to present the information so that the children are able to connect the information that they learned in the lesson to the test. I wonder if this method would help with the ESL students as well.
Cathy

Thank you for the idea of contacting the Feds. I did have one long conversation with a federal administrator that I met on a beach in Mexico last year. He actually listened to me about the challenges I face in teaching, and didn't realize that in reality, behind all the laws and regulations, that there were teachers that sincerely wanted to teach and knew how to teach, but had to get through all the accountability. Who knows where that conversation led.
I guess I've been around enough to lose my faith in being helped by any government, but I should give it a try.
In the mean time, I read through a document I found on this website that gave the results of what teaching mathematics around the world looked like. I printed out over 70 pages, and I will let you know what I find out that's relavent to this issue.

Dear friends

We really appreciate your valuable comments and suggestions.

Concerning the relation between daily life work at the class room and the policies implemented by the national Governments, we would like to share with you the intention of these Forums.
One of the goals of the Learning Sciences and Brain Research at the CERI-OECD is to create links among a) the teaching community, b) the policy decision makers and c) the neuroscientific community.
Our project, that has started late 90's, has developed different studies concerning the neurosciences and learning and its results have been transmitted to the governments in different ways. Our main communication strategy is through the CERI Governing Board, where all member nations of the OCDE are represented. Policy makers from the Education Ministries are represented there. We have also try to translate our publications in the many languages as possible.
We are currently engaged in the second phase of our project, which will finish in 2006. In this period we would like to get closer to the School community to better understand their demands and try to include them in our studies.
The Teacher Forum and the Teach The Brain homepage are part of our strategies to get closer to teachers.
Thus, please be sure that all your comments, suggestions and concerns are taking into consideration and, in a way; they will be researched and transmitted to your own Governments.
It is clear that is not THE solution to all education challenges you face in your country. We know the results of our research will not reveal rapid changes in national education policies. However, we encourage you to consider these tools as a valid long term strategies (among others) to help in the improvement of our educational systems.

Looking forward to see you continuing participating in the Forums discussion.

OECD Moderator

I recieved a message from the Federal Department of Education. I hope that it brings good news! According to No Child Left Behind, up to the third year of American school attendence, under title I and III, children can recieve "reasonable" accomodations in the "content assessments". Some of these include; test taken in the native language and more time. It seems that ESL students shouldn't have to fail their tests because they continue to need language instruction. Cathy

Thank you for the reply regarding making connections with the federal government. I know change does take a long time, and I do appreciate knowing that my involvement in this forum may actually help. So, if you ever have the opportunity to see President Bush, please let him know he is always invited to come into my classroom. I will put him to work.
Cathy, thank you for your input on the NCLB law. I will use that to persuade my administrators to allow at least two of my students to take the test with different accomodations.
I did read through some of the pages about the math test given to 15 year olds from 40 different countries. My intent was to see how and if they tested problem solving. They used four different questions, all requiring problem solving in real world settings, using number sense, geometry, and I can't remember the other two categories. But, they didn't assess them on problem solving as an isolated skill, only within the context of the the math content being tested. I haven't read enough to find out what the results implied.
I have a student teacher now, and I'm looking forward to having more free time to spend reading these online resources!

The papers I have read about dyscalculia indicate that less than 10% of the population suffers from dyscalculia yet we have estimates as high as 50% of the student population failing math standardized tests. What accounts for this difference? Is this also brain oriented?

I noticed in another thread a discussion about accommodations and federal law. My experience has been that accommodations are generally directed toward physical disabilities and not brain oriented difficulties. This is a distinction that we face in this forum. If a student has poor eyesight and can not read the text then we can see this. This is a familiar problem and we know how to handle it.

Now suppose that a student has a visual processing deficiency that is not in the eyeball but in the brain. The student can appear to see well but can not see language. This is something that is not recognized. The members of this form are going to have to address this situation.

I have worked with the problem.

When I taught special education in the 70's and 80's, students were qualified for special services as learning disabled if there was a big enough gap between their potential (IQ score) and performance. I worked with many students who had this gap in math only. I also have worked with many students in the general population in my regualr classrooms that have had problems from severe to minor with math. Many times I have talked to parents who have thought their children were L.D. because of the difficulties they had in math. However, by changing curriculum and strategies, they made improvements.
I have learned enough about the brain from taking a brain research in education class through the Uof W to know a bit about what parts of the brain are used when kids are doing math problems. These functions change, of course, with the different types of problems the child faces (geometry, algebra, number sense, math reasoning). Most students are good in some of these areas, and poor in others. For example, a student may be good in math facts and computation and do poorly with math reasoning and problem solving. Or, the other way around.
The national math standards finally figured out that having a broad base of math standards was better than narrowly defining math as computation skills. When I taught math to my learning disabled students, I taught them computation because that is what they qualified for. Now that we are looking at math in a broader sense, we are redefining math disabilities, also.
The reason I am participating in this part of the forum is to get a sense of what other parts of the world are experiencing in teaching math. The impact of students from other countries is not a minor one. A couple decades ago, these kids would have qualified for special ed services in problem solving. Now, we see that ESL students are not disabled, they are just not understood.
Right now I have a boy in my room who is almost 11 and has a severe dysfunction in memory. He reads on a primer level, and cannot retain math skills long enough to become proficient with computation. He receives special services in reading and math. Yet, this guy knows how to problem solve. When working in groups doing problem solving questions, he knows the questions to ask and the strategies to try. Combined with an ESL student who doesn't understand the logic of the question, but can do the computation, they do well.
So, if this forum wants to work specifically with math neurological disorders, you will be missing out on some good strategies if you don't consider a broader continum. My complaint with the government is that they are not considering this when they put constraints on the public school system by way of testing and funding. Alot of the difficulties students face in math are because of the way success in math is defined.

Karldw, could you tell us the area in which you are teaching? I wonder if you are teaching in the U.S. or elsewhere. It would make a difference in whether what I am going to write will be relevent to you or not. You wrote about the use of accomodations. In Michigan there is a movement to standardize among the many districts a procedure for determining special education services. The first step is the pre-referral process. At this point the general education teacher will identify a child who is struggling and will attempt to accomodate this child with various changes to the curriculum. These are changes that don't result in modifications (benchmarks are reduced or changed). An example of a math accomodation might be to reduce the number of math problems assigned. For writing it may be accepting that penmenship is acceptable at the level that the child is at. The teacher will document what accomodations are tried and if there isn't improvement then the child will be assessed for special education services. I hope that this streamlining will occur in Michigan because IDEA is so complicated that many districts are routinely out of compliance and children suffer when they aren't learning.
4th grade teacher, I share your interest in international math strategies. I can't help but think that if I was more internet savy, I could find different countries' education departments and learn how they teach. At least for those countries who are English speaking! As you learn strategies, I hope that you will post them at this site.

When you said U of W I assume you meant University of Washington. If that is so do you know of Dr. Calvin and if so how?

4th grade teacher Wrote:When I taught special education in the 70's and 80's, students were qualified for special services as learning disabled if there was a big enough gap between their potential (IQ score) and performance. I worked with many students who had this gap in math only. I also have worked with many students in the general population in my regualr classrooms that have had problems from severe to minor with math. Many times I have talked to parents who have thought their children were L.D. because of the difficulties they had in math. However, by changing curriculum and strategies, they made improvements..

I find what you say to be very interesting. I believe that what you are saying is that the students apparent defiency was only in mathematics and that this was for students who qualified for special ed as well as those in regular classes. What do you mean when you say “by changing curriculum and strategies.”

Do you feel that there may be a cognitive gap between standard math curricula and childrens processing?

Cathy Trinh Wrote:Karldw, could you tell us the area in which you are teaching? I wonder if you are teaching in the U.S. or elsewhere. .

I was referring to Florida. There was total disregard for the law and the intent of IDEA. There were attempts to do IEPs illegally. Once done they were not carried through on. The public education system totally failed the student in both math and language.

4th grade teacher Wrote:The national math standards finally figured out that having a broad base of math standards was better than narrowly defining math as computation skills. When I taught math to my learning disabled students, I taught them computation because that is what they qualified for. Now that we are looking at math in a broader sense, we are redefining math disabilities, also.

I would like to know more about these statements. What do you mean about “having a broad base of math standards..” Do you have any references on this? You imply that you do not have to teach computation now. Is that true? How do you compensate for lack of computational skills? Also, what are the new definitions of math disabilities and do you have references for this?

I was referring to Florida. There was total disregard for the law and the intent of IDEA. There were attempts to do IEPs illegally. Once done they were not carried through on. The public education system totally failed the student in both math and language.


Karldw, why wasn't a due process complaint made? If there is disregard for the law then the district needs to be brought into compliance. Is it too late to file a complaint with Florida's Office for Civil Rights?

Cathy Trinh Wrote:Karldw, why wasn't a due process complaint made? If there is disregard for the law then the district needs to be brought into compliance. Is it too late to file a complaint with Florida's Office for Civil Rights?

Unfortunately I was not in a position to have standing under the standing to sue doctrine. There is a disregard for the law and the district does need to be brought into compliance, however, merely stating that and wishing that is not enough. It is well known that IDEA is not well supported and implemented. Free and appropriate education concepts are ignored. Some have tried to use civil rights laws to get justice. The No Child Left Behind Law fails and is not funded. It needs to be challenged. The problems are to finance such struggles and to be able to achieve a result in time to do the student any good. These are only two examples of pretty words in law and no commitment to the apparent intent.