New Approaches to Teaching Early Number Skills and to Remediate Number Fact Dyscalculia

Abstract

The contents of this chapter are twofold: First, we will provide the reader with a brief overview of current concepts of how early number skills develop and how they may be fostered. While most respective intervention programs focus on the establishment of domain-specific number skills (such as number sense and counting procedures and principles), there is emerging evidence that also domain-general training has the potential to foster the establishment of early number skills. Here, we will present findings from a kindergarten study showing that training spatial skills facilitate the establishment of number sense in typically developing children.

Second, we will present preliminary but highly promising findings regarding the effectiveness of new intervention approaches for the remediation of number fact knowledge (e.g., 3 × 6). Going beyond the well established drill and problem-solving approaches (the first emphasizes learning by repetition, while the latter aims at establishing procedural/conceptual knowledge to compensate for the number fact deficit; e.g., 3 × 6 equals 6 + 6 + 6), we present a new multisensory approach to teach number facts. Our preliminary findings are encouraging and show that associating colors with number magnitudes clearly facilitates the retrieval of multiplication fact knowledge in dyscalculic children.

In the concluding paragraph we will provide an outlook for future research endeavors targeted at developing and evaluating novel intervention methods that aim that aim (i) at fostering early number skills and (ii) at the remediation of arithmetic difficulties (e.g. incorporating embodiment into targeted cognitive intervention).