Dyscalculia is a learning disability that makes math challenging to process and understand.

The symptoms of this disorder usually appear in childhood, especially when children learn how to do basic math. However, many adults have dyscalculia and don’t know it. People who have dyscalculia often face mental health issues when they have to do math, such as anxiety, depression and other difficult feelings.

There’s also a form of dyscalculia that appears later in life. This form, acquired dyscalculia, can happen at any age. This usually happens for other reasons like a medical condition.

Dyscalculia is uncommon but widespread. Experts estimate it affects between 3% and 7% of people worldwide.

The main predictors include:

  • Not knowing which of two digits is larger, i.e. understanding the magnitude and relationship of numbers
  • Lacking effective counting strategies
  • Poor fluency in identification of numbers
  • Inability to add simple single-digit numbers mentally
  • Limitations in working memory capacity

Symptoms of dyscalculia

The symptoms of dyscalculia depend on which parts of the process a person struggles with most. It can also depend on the person’s age and the situations they encounter most often.

Young children (up to the pre-K and kindergarten levels)

For very young children, the most common symptoms include trouble with:

  • Counting upward.
  • Connecting a number to that many of an object (for example, connecting the number 4 to that many marbles in front of them).
  • Recognizing numbers and math symbols.
  • Organizing numbers, such as largest to smallest or first to last.
  • Recognizing and using number lines.
  • Learning using money (such as coins or bills).

School-age children (primary/grade/elementary school)

The symptoms of dyscalculia often draw attention when children start school around age 6. For these children, the symptoms include trouble with:

  • Counting on fingers with small numbers (especially at an age where that seems unnecessary).
  • Identifying small quantities of items just by looking (this looks like needing to count each one by one).
  • Doing simple calculations from memory.
  • Memorizing multiplication tables.
  • Recognizing the same math problem when the order of the numbers or symbols changes (struggling to understand that 1+7=8 is the same as 8=7+1).
  • Understanding word problems or more advanced symbols (such as > meaning “greater than” or < meaning “less than”).
  • Organizing numbers by scale (10s, 100s, 1,000s) or decimal place (0.1, 0.01, 0.001).

Teenagers (secondary school- or high school-age) and adults

The symptoms in teenagers and adults often look like trouble with the following:

  • Counting backward.
  • Solving word problems.
  • Breaking down problems into multiple steps to solve them.
  • Measuring items.
  • Measuring quantities (such as for cooking/baking recipes).
  • Using money (coins and bills) to pay for items, exchanging bills for coins (and vice versa) and making change.
  • Understanding and converting fractions.

Emotional symptoms

In addition to symptoms that directly relate to someone’s ability to do math, people with dyscalculia may show emotional symptoms when faced with situations where math is necessary. Those emotional symptoms often include:

  • Anxiety (including test anxiety) or even panic.
  • Agitation, anger or aggression (such as temper tantrums in younger children).
  • Fear (including a fear or even phobia of going to school).
  • Physical symptoms of any of the above (nausea and vomiting, sweating, stomachache, etc.)