Dive Brief:
- Dyscalculia — a learning disability that makes numbers and math difficult, similar to how dyslexia makes words and reading difficult — affects roughly the same share of students as those with a reading disability. But students with dyscalculia have "been far less well-served by schools," according to an August brief released by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
- Districts lack systems needed to identify dyscalculia, such as designated specialist roles, intervention infrastructures, and teacher preparation. Untreated dyscalculia persists into adulthood, CRPE said.
- "Students with this learning disability are often missed because most teachers are not equipped to notice them," the brief states. In one 2024 UK-based study, only about 1 in 5 teachers reported strong familiarity with dyscalculia, and the familiarity was associated with special education rather than general teaching.
Dive Insight:
Between 3% to 7% of all children, adolescents and adults have dyscalculia, according to an estimate published in 2019 by the National Institutes of Health. The CRPE brief describes dyscalculia as "one of the most common learning disabilities." Up to 60% of students with dyscalculia also have co-occurring challenges — most commonly dyslexia and ADHD.
This learning disability is more than "struggling in math,” CRPE said. Dyscalculia is defined by "severe and persistent" difficulty in processing numbers, among other issues, that is separate from intellectual disability and cannot be explained by inadequate instruction, sensory difficulties, or other conditions.
"Students who meet these criteria show deficits in number processing and magnitude representation and have a distinct cognitive profile, not simply a more severe version of ordinary math struggle," CRPE said.
There is currently a lack of consensus on how to define, identify and support dyscalculia and other math learning disabilities, according to CRPE's national scan of states’ math policies and bills. While a handful of states, including North Carolina and West Virginia, refer to the learning disability in recent bills, they don't include provisions requiring screening or diagnosis.
Some states — Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Rhode Island — have proposed or enacted mandates for universal dyscalculia screening of students within typically younger age ranges.
While a larger number of states have enacted policies recommending math screening to identify students at risk of math problems more generally, those states don't establish anything specific for dyscalculia. Rather, they leave screening measures in the hands of districts.
According to the CRPE brief, relying on achievement data to identify these students "answers the wrong question" in that it does not reveal why, which mathematical processes are involved, or whether the difficulty constitutes a learning disability.
Instead, the brief suggests that districts put in place a distinct process for identification, which begins with a brief universal screening to flag students who require closer examination before a potential diagnosis.
It should be followed by a diagnostic follow-up, which identifies the source and the profile of the difficulty. Students who are flagged "at risk" at the screening stage should then be assessed using tests that examine the mental processes they use to understand numbers, rather than curricular exams.
Before any diagnosis and during the final stage of an evaluation, districts should first rule out alternative explanations for the persistent difficulty. They should also do an infrastructure audit, the brief said, and establish a clear, school-wide referral protocol for math learning concerns.
"Teachers need to know exactly what to do and what to expect when they flag a student for persistent math difficulty, just as they do for reading difficulty," CRPE said.
