Brain Fact Friday "Understanding Dyscalculia: The Math Learning Disability"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, for Brain Fact Friday and episode #137. In Today’s Brain Fact Friday You Will Learn: ✔︎ Why the Foundational Skills in Literacy and Mathematics are so Important. ✔︎ How Students with Reading Difficulties and Like Students with Math Difficulties. ✔︎ An Introduction to Dyscalculia: The Math Learning Disability. ✔︎ How to Recognize Dyscalculia, and Strategies to Assist Students Who Struggle with Math. ✔︎ Many Celebrities Have Dyscalculia and Dyslexia: It’s Not a Matter of Intelligence. I'm Andrea Samadi, a former educator who has been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports, and the workplace for the past 20 years. If you have been listening to our podcast, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with an understanding of our brain. Our goal with this podcast is to bring the most current neuroscience research to you and make it applicable in your life whether you are a teacher in the classroom or using these ideas to improve productivity and results in your workplace. The idea is that these strategies will give you a new angle and provide you with a new way of looking at learning, with the brain in mind. As I am researching and learning new ideas, I’m also implementing them myself, and making connections to past speakers, so that we can all benefit from the research that is emerging in this new field of educational neuroscience. The Importance of The Foundational Skills: Literacy and Mathematics Which brings us to this week’s Brain Fact Friday and the connections I made while recording episode #136[i] with Lois Letchford, and her son who failed first grade in 1994 when testing revealed he could only read 10 words, had no strengths and a low IQ and was clearly struggling with his academics in his early years.  Thank goodness his Mother figured out that he needed to learn how to read with different learning strategies that you can learn about in episode #136, and see how her son defied the odds he was given at an early age and graduated from Oxford University with his Ph.D. What would have happened to Nicholas Letchford if he didn’t have such a happy ending to his story? If he did not find a different way to build those foundational skills that he needed for literacy achievement?  I remembered a webinar I prepared for the educational publisher, Voyager Sopris Learning in 2018 on “Nine Brain-Based Strategies to Skyrocket Literacy Achievement”[ii] and in the introduction to this webinar, I talk about the U.S. statistics that emphasize the importance of our children learning to read proficiently by 3rd grade. Did you know that: 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare. Over 70% of America’s inmates cannot read above a 4th grade level. 1 in 4 children in America grow up without learning how to read at all. Students who don't read proficiently by the 3rd grade are 4 times likelier to drop out of school. Nearly 85% of the juveniles who face trial in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, proving that there is a close relationship between illiteracy and crime. More than 60% of all inmates are functionally illiterate. And these shocking statistics lead to high drop-out rates, low graduation rates and college completion, illiteracy, incarceration, and welfare, proving that when a student is struggling with their reading, there is so much more at stake than what meets the eye. Then I began researching for episode #138 with Dr. Daniel Ansari, a professor, and Canada Research Chair[iii] in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning in the Department of Psychology and the Brain in Mind Institute[iv] at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario where he heads the Numerical Cognition Lab