Opportunities for recognising, assessing, and providing online support among elementary school students with dyscalculia

Options for recognising, surveying, and online support for dyscalculia in primary school students

Abstract

Mathematics is present throughout our lives. Already in infancy, children become acquainted with quantities and the differentiation of quantities (Starkey & Cooper, 1995; Huntley et al., 2000; Csépe et al., 2007, 2008). According to von Aster and Shalev (2007), the quantitative core system (cardinality) develops in infancy. An infant is capable of subitising, estimating, and comparing the quantities of a small number of items. After learning from their environment in early childhood, children perceive quantities and then understand the strategy needed for counting and are able to count verbally. They use different classifications to determine the quantities. Kindergarten prepares the knowledge needed for the application of the concept of numbers and lays the foundations for the concept of operations. As a continuation of knowledge acquisition of knowledge, in primary school the establishment of a unified and broad foundation takes place with a focus on the development and consolidation of the concept of numbers and operations. Number words representing quantities are associated with digits, therefore school children express them with symbols without the presence of quantities (von Aster & Shalev, 2007; Jármi, 2013, p. 50). This developmental process allows for the learning of written operation performance in the lower grades, while the internal number line (analogous quantity representation) develops in the child, which strengthens spatial thinking. In the initial stage of the lower school grades, active knowledge acquisition dominates, which is the first level of abstraction of mathematical activities. In the grades that follow, the constantly and spirally repeating, expanding nature of knowledge strengthens the fourth level of abstraction, i.e., the independent application of symbols.