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

• Published in: Journal of learning disabilities Vol. 56; no. 4; pp. 257 - 277
• Main Authors: Li, Danfeng, Zhang, Xuejing, Zhang, Li
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2023; SAGE Publications and Hammill Institute on Disabilities; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Attention; Child; Children; Cognition; Cognitive ability; Cognitive ability tests; Developmental Delays; Dyscalculia; Elementary School Students; Elementary schools; Executive Function; Foreign Countries; Grade 2; Grade 3; Humans; Learning Disabilities; Learning Disabilities - diagnosis; Magnitude; Mathematics; Mathematics Education; Mathematics Skills; Medical screening; Memory, Short-Term; Short Term Memory; Spatial Ability; Special education; Time; Visual Perception; China; domain-specific; developmental dyscalculia; approximate number system; domain-general; finger sense; executive function
• ISSN: 0022-2194; 1538-4780
• DOI: 10.1177/00222194221099674

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.