Dyscalculia Association

General information

The development of this outstanding, award-winning resource was driven by SENCo's and headteachers in the UK who were clearly concerned that a small subset of their pupils were just not making age-appropriate progress, could not make meaningful sense of numbers, confused number symbols and encountered difficulty with sequencing and place value. Our work began with Colnbrook Special School in Hertfordshire and the research into understanding this complex maths difficulty involved a multi-disciplinary team: scholars, educationalists, dyscalculia specialists, neuroscientists, neuro-rehabilitators, speech and language therapists, dyspraxia specialists, educational psychologists, SEN teachers and early years development practitioners.

Developmental Dyscalculia is an arithmetic-based specific learning difficulty that affects 1:20 of the population.
It is important to differentiate Developmental Dyscalculia from Maths Developmental Delays so that a purposeful intervention can be offered.

Dynamo Maths is a specialist resource designed to meet the needs of pupils with developmental dyscalculia. It is built around a NumberSenseMMR™ (Meaning, Magnitude and Relationship) framework and incorporates an adaptive assessment signposted to an individual intervention pathway. Its strength lies in its individual difference and developmental approach.

Pupils with developmental dyscalculia have significant maths difficulties and struggle to make age-appropriate progress with maths. The degree of difficulty varies from pupil to pupil and therefore a one-size-fits-all intervention is not appropriate for pupils with developmental dyscalculia. Success is not about orchestrating correct answers as much as it determined by the pupil's ability to transfer the skills within different contexts.

Supporting a pupil using a developmental approach requires a trained interventionist to meet a pupil at their development level. It requires observing how the pupil is harnessing their sensory pathways and to create experiences that can bring about a shift in learning, cognition and application.

Each child is unique and an individual-difference intervention approach needs to be centered on the pupil, where the trained interventionist respects the pupil’s thoughts, links ideas and feelings and pro-actively nurtures development through the multiple pathways of Dynamo Intervention.
Dynamo Intervention offers a Triple-Pathway approach where the interventionist has a personalised roadmap with multiple activities to draw upon and create experiences that are developmentally appropriate.

Mathematics has a componential nature and specifically targeting one component at a time can not only scaffold the progression in the targeted components but also in a number of other components (Dowker & Sigley, 2010; Holmes & Dowker, 2013).

Our observation is that the difficulties lie in early core foundational number skills and once the core difficulties have been identified and the barriers gradually removed, the pupil is able to access higher number areas. Research from 3500 data sets shows that the small improvements made in the Meaning and Magnitude areas impact the development in the Maths area. When pupils develop these new skills, it helps build their confidence and self-esteem.

There are many components involved in the development of maths. A recent study carried out by the University of Oxford shows how the individual difference approach alongside an intentional intervention using Dynamo Intervention has brought success. http://www.dynamomaths.co.uk/marketing/PresentationWCESUniversityofOxford-EvidenceofSupport-Release.pdf

“Dynamo Maths programme has a positive impact on the Dyscalculia Symptoms highlighted by the Profiler, illustrating that these symptoms are malleable and can be positively improved if specific intervention is provided to target each of them” (Dowker A.2016; Zerafa M 2016)

For case studies on the evidence and success of Dynamo Maths http://www.dynamomaths.co.uk/CaseStudies.html