Behavioral and Brain Functions

Background: In a companion article [1], we described the development and evaluation of software designed to remediate dyscalculia. This software is based on the hypothesis that dyscalculia is due to a "core deficit" in number sense or in its access via symbolic information. Here we review the evidence for this hypothesis, and present results from an initial open-trial test of the software in a sample of nine 7–9 year old children with mathematical difficulties. Methods: Children completed adaptive training on numerical comparison for half an hour a day, four days a week over a period of five-weeks. They were tested before and after intervention on their performance in core numerical tasks: counting, transcoding, base-10 comprehension, enumeration, addition, subtraction, and symbolic and non-symbolic numerical comparison. Results: Children showed specific increases in performance on core number sense tasks. Speed of subitizing and numerical comparison increased by several hundred msec. Subtraction accuracy increased by an average of 23%. Performance on addition and base-10 comprehension tasks did not improve over the period of the study. Conclusion: Initial open-trial testing showed promising results, and suggested that the software was successful in increasing number sense over the short period of the study. However these results need to be followed up with larger, controlled studies. The issues of transfer to higher-level tasks, and of the best developmental time window for intervention also need to be addressed. Background In the preceding accompanying article [1], we described the development and validation of software designed to remediate dyscalculia. In this article, we first put the use of the software in its context with a discussion of dyscalculia including its symptoms, causes, and possible subtypes. We then present results from initial testing of this software in an actual remediation setting, using a group of children with mathematical learning difficulties. Published: 30 May 2006 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2006, 2:20 doi:10.1186/1744-9081-2-20 Received: 08 May 2006 Accepted: 30 May 2006 This article is available from: http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/2/1/20 © 2006 Wilson et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.