What Skills Could Distinguish Developmental Dyscalculia and Typically Developing Children: Evidence From a 2-Year Longitudinal Screening

Abstract

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a mathematics learning disorder that affects approximately 5% to 7% of the population. This study aimed to detect the underlying domain-specific and domain-general differences between DD and typically developing (TD) children. We recruited 9-year-old primary school children to form the DD group via a 2-year longitudinal screening process. In total, 75 DD children were screened from 1,657 children after the one-time screening, and 13 DD children were screened from 1,317 children through a consecutive 2-year longitudinal screening. In total, 13 experimental tasks were administered to assess their cognitive abilities to test the domain-specific magnitude representation hypothesis (including symbolic and nonsymbolic magnitude comparisons) and four alternative domain-general hypotheses (including working memory, executive function, attention, and visuospatial processing). The DD group had worse performance than the TD group on the number sense task, finger sense task, shifting task, and one-back task after both one-time and two-time screening. Logistic regressions further indicated the differences on the shifting task and the nonsymbolic magnitude comparison task could distinguish DD and TD children. Our findings suggest that domain-specific nonsymbolic magnitude representation and domain-general executive function both contribute to DD. Thus, both domain-specific and domain-general abilities will be necessary to investigate and to intervene in DD groups in the future.

The prevalence of mathematical difficulties among primary school children in Mainland China: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Some researchers have reported that the prevalence of MD in China is consistent with that in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, accounting for approximately 3.3%−6% of the total child population ( 6 , 7 ); other studies, by contrast, have reported that this prevalence in China is as high as 13.8% ( 8 ). Therefore, in the absence of a consensus ( 9 ), further research is necessary to determine the prevalence of MD among Chinese children.…”