Ann Dowker

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Experimental Psychology

There is still much debate about the exact nature and frequency of developmental dyscalculia, and about how it should be defined. This article examines several key questions in turn: Is developmental dyscalculia a distinct disorder, or should it be seen as the lower end of a continuum—or possibly more than one continuum—of numerical ability? Do ind...

Research on typically developing children and adults and people with developmental and acquired dyscalculia converges in indicating that arithmetical ability is not unitary but is made up of many different components. Categories of components include non-symbolic quantity representation and processing; symbolic quantity representation and processin...

Subitizing is the ability to enumerate small quantities efficiently and automatically. Counting is a strategy adopted for larger numerosities resulting in a near linear increase in response time with each increase in quantity. Some developmental studies suggest that being able to subitize efficiently may be a predictor of later arithmetical ability...

The suspension of face-to-face teaching, due to the COVID-19 social distancing regulations, raised serious concerns about the impacts on children’s academic learning. Because the implementation of distance education in Germany was entirely the responsibility of individual schools, and because the home learning environments varied across households,...

It has been suggested that parental mathematics anxiety may influence their children’s mathematics anxiety, attitudes, and performance. It remains an open question whether these parent-child associations differ by parental sex or parental involvement. We tested 249 Dutch-speaking Belgian participants, forming 83 (biological) mother–father–child tri...

Die Aussetzung des Präsenzunterrichts aufgrund der COVID-19-Maßnahmen gab Anlass zur Frage, inwiefern der Distanzunterricht das schulische Lernen beeinflusste. Da die Umsetzung des Distanzunterrichts in den Schulen stark variierte und die Lernumgebungen in den einzelnen Haushalten verschieden waren, hatten Kinder während der COVID-19 Pandemie sehr...

The suspension of face-to-face teaching, due to the COVID-19 social distancing regulations, raised serious concerns about the impacts on children's academic learning. Because the implementation of distance education in Germany was entirely the responsibility of individual schools, and because the home learning environments varied across households,...

Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) signifies a failure in representing quantities, which impairs the performance of basic math operations and schooling achievement during childhood. The lack of specificity in assessment measures and respective cut-offs are the most challenging factors to identify children with DD, particularly in disadvantaged educatio...

In this paper, we discuss several largely undisputed claims about mathematics anxiety (MA) and propose where MA research should focus, including theoretical clarifications on what MA is and what constitutes its opposite pole; discussion of construct validity, specifically relations between self‐descriptive, neurophysiological, and cognitive measure...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

Many studies have indicated that mathematics anxiety, and other negative attitudes and emotions toward mathematics, are pervasive and are associated with lower mathematical performance. Some previous research has suggested that working memory is related to both mathematics anxiety and mathematics. Moreover, both gender and chosen course of study (s...

We examined the role of visuo-spatial working memory in different types of arithmetic ability in children. Previous research had suggested that arithmetic is not a single entity (Dowker, 2005, 2015), and also that visuo-spatial working memory is specifically involved in mathematical cognition (McKenzie et al., 2003) There has, however, been little...

This volume contains the papers presented at the International Conference Building on the Past to Prepare for the Future held from August 8-13, 2022, in King’s College, Cambridge, UK. It was the 16th conference organised by The Mathematics Education for the Future Project - an international educational and philanthropic project founded in 1986 and...

The author first provides a summary of the first three chapters in this book, which are focused on theoretical issues relevant to mathematical difficulties. The chapter progresses to discuss the componential nature of arithmetic and the impact this has on assessment and interventions for children with mathematical difficulties. Then the chapter dis...

In this paper we list ten fairly undisputed claims about Mathematics Anxiety (MA) and propose where MA research should focus on. The areas future MA research should focus on comprise (a) theoretical clarifications on what MA is, and what constitutes its opposite pole, (b) construct validity – specifically relations between self-descriptive, (neuro)...

This study investigated the effect of educational level and of the syntactic representation of numbers in Arabic on the task of transcoding two-digit numbers from dictation. The participants were primary, junior-high, and high school pupils and higher education students. All spoke Arabic as a mother tongue. They performed a transcoding task, namely...

The study focuses on the effect of the lexical-syntactic structure on the patterns of errors by Arab first graders in tasks involving reading two-digit number and writing two-digit numbers to dictation. Children made few change or omission errors, indicating that they had little problem with the lexical aspects of the counting system. However, they...

This study investigated the effect of educational level and of the syntactic representation of numbers in Arabic on the task of transcoding two-digit numbers from dictation. The participants were primary, junior-high, and high school pupils and higher education students. All spoke Arabic as a mother tongue. They performed a transcoding task, namely...

Domain-general skills such as executive functions (EFs), and domain-specific skills such as non-symbolic number sense and symbolic understanding are often pitted against each other as predictors of emerging maths. Here we aimed to investigate early childhood relations between these foundational skills with a balanced, longitudinal design. One hundr...

Most studies suggest that home numeracy is correlated with preschool children’s current mathematical performance, and also predicts their mathematical performance longitudinally. However, this finding is not universal, and some studies do not suggest a close relationship between home numeracy and preschoolers’ mathematical development. There are se...

This paper reviews and discusses research on arithmetical strengths and weaknesses in children with specific developmental cognitive disabilities. It focusses on children with dyslexia, developmental language disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. In general, studies show that arithmetical weaknesses are commoner in children...

This study investigated mathematics anxiety from an intergenerational perspective, by investigating data on 172 primary-school children and both their biological parents. This family dataset (n = 516) allowed us to not only replicate previous findings per generation but also, importantly, explore intergenerational correlations. We found a significa...

International comparisons show that some countries and groups do much better in mathematics tests than others. Suggested explanations include teaching methods and school characteristics; languages and, in particular, counting systems; and cultural and occupational practices. The entry reviews the evidence on the influence of these factors on mathem...

Developmental cognitive neuroscience highlights the importance of interactions between children and their environment. As young children spend increasing time in childcare, it is key to investigate the impact of “maths‐talk” and maths provisions in preschools. Qualitative insights from early educators indicate a greater bias toward counting activit...

The final part of my 1998 chapter

The second part of my 1998 chapter

Here, we present four different intervention methods that aim to improve numerical and mathematical abilities. These used different specific methods and designs, targeted different sub-domains of mathematics (basic number processing, arithmetic, and geometry), and involved different populations (children and adults, with typical and atypical mathem...

Most studies of children’s attitudes to mathematics have dealt with children in second grade or later, and have suggested that attitudes deteriorate, and anxiety increases with age. The present study investigated attitudes to mathematics in 67 English and 49 Chinese children at the end of their first year of school. The participants were given Thom...

East Asian pupils have consistently outperformed Western pupils in international comparisons of mathematical performance at both primary and secondary school level. It has sometimes been suggested that a contributory factor is the transparent counting systems of East Asian languages, which may facilitate number representation. The present study com...

Feelings of apprehension and fear brought on by mathematical performance can affect correct mathematical application and can influence the achievement and future paths of individuals affected by it. In recent years, mathematics anxiety has become a subject of increasing interest both in educational and clinical settings. This ground-breaking collec...

Studies in several domains of expertise have established that experience-dependent plasticity brings about both functional and anatomical changes. However, little is known about how such changes come to shape the brain in the case of expertise acquired by professional mathematicians. Here, we aimed to identify cognitive and brain-structural (grey a...

The aim of the present study was to extend the previous intervention research in math by examining whether elementary school children with poor calculation fluency benefit from strategy training focusing on derived fact strategies and following an integrative framework, i.e., integrating factual, conceptual, and procedural arithmetic knowledge. It...

Difficulty with arithmetic is a common problem for children and adults, though there has been some work on the topic for a surprisingly long time. This chapter will review some of the research that has been done over the years on interventions with primary school children. Interventions can be of various levels of intensiveness, ranging from whole-...

Background Children have been found to report and demonstrate math anxiety as early as the first grade. However, previous results concerning the relationship between math anxiety and performance are contradictory, with some studies establishing a correlation between them while others do not. These contradictory results might be related to varying o...

In a randomized controlled trial 104 primary school children, who received an individualized numeracy intervention, Catch Up Numeracy, were compared with 100 children, who received matched-time teaching, and 107, who received business-as-usual teaching. They were assessed before and after intervention, on the Number Screening Test and on both the r...

Linguistic influences on number processing are ubiquitous. They occur at conceptual, semantic, syntactic, lexical, visuo-spatial-orthographic, phonological, and other levels. Research should now address more precisely which language characteristics at which level influence particular numerical tasks at particular ages.

The construct of mathematics anxiety has been an important topic of study at least since the concept of “number anxiety” was introduced by Dreger and Aiken (1957), and has received increasing attention in recent years. This paper focuses on what research has revealed about mathematics anxiety in the last 60 years, and what still remains to be learn...

We investigated derived fact strategy use in RR, an aphasic patient with severely impaired working memory (no phonological loop), and 16 neurologically healthy matched controls. Participants were tested on derived fact strategy use in multi-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. RR's accuracy only differed from controls in multi...

The Welsh language uses a regular counting system, whereas English uses an irregular counting system, and schools within Wales teach either through the medium of Welsh or English. This provides the opportunity to compare linguistic effects on arithmetical skills in the absence of many other confounding factors that arise in international comparison...

The relative linguistic transparency of the Asian counting system has been used to explain Asian students’ relative superiority in cross-cultural comparisons of mathematics achievement. To test the validity and extent of linguistic transparency in accounting for mathematical abilities, this study tested Chinese and British primary school children....

The surge in noninvasive brain stimulation studies investigating cognitive enhancement has neglected the effect of interindividual differences, such as traits, on stimulation outcomes. Using the case of mathematics anxiety in a sample of healthy human participants in a placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover experiment, we show that identical t...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of numerical cognition by bringing together writing by leading researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and education, covering work using different methodological approaches in humans and animals. During the last decade there had been an explosion of studies and new findings with theoretical and translat...

Our study suggested that linguistic and cultural factors both affect arithmetic learning. Our findings highlight the importance of developing culturally-specific norms for screening tools of mathematic learning difficulties, to facilitate accurate detection.

Forty-four children between 6;0 and 7;11 took part in a study of derived fact strategy use. They were assigned to addition and subtraction levels on the basis of calculation pretests. They were then given Dowker's (1998) test of derived fact strategies in addition, involving strategies based on the Identity, Commutativity, Addend +1, Addend −1, and...

This article examines the treatment of disabled characters in British and North-American children's classics and in books that are out-of-print or less available to children from the 19th century to early 20th century. One of the main findings of this article is that the treatment of disabled characters is often more complex and varied in the latte...

Many children who would not be identified as having special educational needs are low-attaining in mathematics, which often has a severe impact on their progress at school and their successes in later life. This paper describes Catch Up Numeracy, a non-intensive targeted intervention for children who are low-attaining in mathematics, which is deliv...

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) and its treatment are receiving increasing research attention. A PsychInfo search for peer-reviewed articles with dyscalculia as a title word reveals 31 papers published from 1991-2001, versus 74 papers published from 2002-2012. Still, these small counts reflect the paucity of research on DD compared to dyslexia, desp...

Low numeracy skills have a negative impact on the employment prospects and mental and physical health of individuals, and on the economic status of countries. Clearly, this is a high priority area where efficient strategies for intervention can lead to a better outcome, especially when implemented at an early age. We discuss here present and future...

Problem: Recent research indicates that about 17% of school leavers have significant literacy problems, a proportion that has not changed significantly in the last 20 years. Literacy problems are associated with increased risk of poverty, unemployment, criminal conviction, and ill-health. Most adults with literacy problems had difficulties in readi...

44 Grade 3 children and 45 Grade 5 children from English primary schools were given the British abilities scales basic number skills subtest, and a Mathematics Attitude and Anxiety Questionnaire, using pictorial rating scales to record their Self-rating for maths, Liking for maths, Anxiety about maths, and Unhappiness about poor performance in math...

Mathematics anxiety (MA), a state of discomfort associated with performing mathematical tasks, is thought to affect a notable proportion of the school age population. Some research has indicated that MA negatively affects mathematics performance and that girls may report higher levels of MA than boys. On the other hand some research has indicated t...

Figure S1. Standardized MA scores of excluded participants. Scores are in units of standard deviations (Y axis).

This is an extremely interesting chapter that describes children’s difficulties in mathematics. It discusses the problem of learning difficulties in mathematics. As the authors point out, mathematical difficulties are indeed very common. This has been found to be so internationally (Butterworth 2005; Bzufka et al. 2000; Gross-Tsur et al. 1996), tho...

Two hundred and fifteen children aged between 5 and 9 years were asked to estimate the answers to addition sums. Their competence at addition was first assessed, and they were accordingly divided into five groups. Children of each level were given a set of estimation problems involving sums a little too difficult for them to calculate (termed their...

Background. Difficulty with arithmetic is ac ommon problem. There is increasing evidence that arithmetical cognition is made up of multiple components, and that it is quite possible for children and adults to show strong discrepancies, in either direction, between the components. This suggested the desirability of developing interventions that asse...

339 children aged 6 and 7 at Oxford primary schools took part in a study of arithmetic. 204 of the children had been selected by their teachers as having mathematical difficulties and the other 135 children were unselected. They were assigned to an Addition Performance Level on the basis of a calculation pretest, and then given Dowker's (1998) test...

This special issue is dedicated to the nature of mathematical difficulties in children, from neuropsychological, cognitive and developmental perspectives. There has been increasing recent interest in the problem of developmental dyscalculia, generally defined as severe difficulties in learning and doing arithmetic, that cannot be attributed to gene...

This chapter describes an intervention program that is based on the findings that suggest that arithmetic is made up of numerous components, and involves assessing and targeting individual children's specific weaknesses. It analyses a few specific components of arithmetic, and the relationships between them, in a group of children who were selected...

This study investigated individual differences in different aspects of early number concepts in preschoolers. Eighty 4-year-olds from Oxford nursery classes took part. They were tested on accuracy of counting sets of objects; the cardinal word principle; the order irrelevance principle; and predicting the results of repeated addition and subtractio...

Wales uses languages with both regular (Welsh) and irregular (English) counting systems. Three groups of 6- and 8-year-old Welsh children with varying degrees of exposure to the Welsh language—those who spoke Welsh at both home and school; those who spoke Welsh only at home; and those who spoke only English—were given standardized tests of arithmet...

This research aims to investigate the differences and similarities in the understanding of animal metaphors in English and Chinese children and adults. 95 Chinese children and adults and 54 English children and adults participated in the experiment. The child participants are aged from eight to eleven and adults are aged from eighteen to forty. The...

One experiment investigated the effects of distortion and multiple prime repetition (super-repetition) on repetition priming using divided-visual-field word identification at test and mixed-case words (e.g., goAT). The experiment measured form-specificity (the effect of matching lettercase at study and test) for two non-conceptual study tasks. For...

Is the FRA a reliable and valid instrument? Are there any gender differences concerning math anxiety? Are there any developmental changes in this regard in the course of the early grades? Together with the dyscalculia test TEDI-MATH, the FRA was presented to a total of 450 children from the first to the third grade of primary school (at least 40 gi...

Zusammenfassung: Einleitung: Rechenangst ist ein haufiges Phanomen und oft mit Dyskalkulie assoziiert. Dementsprechend wichtig ist ein standardisiertes Instrument zur Fruherkennung von Rechenangst, welches nun in der deutschsprachigen Version des Fragebogens fur Rechenangst (FRA) fur 6- bis 9-jahrige Kinder (Originalversion: Thomas & Dowker, 2000)...

146 children (mean age 6 years 10 months) were included in the Numeracy Recovery intervention programme. The programme involved working with children who have been identified by their teachers as having problems with arithmetic. These children were assessed on nine components of early numeracy, and received weekly individual intervention (half an h...

Functional brain imaging has been largely reserved for adults. However, in recent years there have been increasing attempts to use functional brain imaging to inform our understanding of child development. These have taken three main forms: (1) Children with known or suspected neurological disorders may undergo brain imaging for medical diagnostic...