Causes of dyscalculia
Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that is caused by a malfunction in the cognitive development of the child.
This implies the processing, organising, memorizing and accessing information in the brains. Disorders in the cognitive development can either be hereditary or caused by brain damage, or severe didactic or pedagogic neglection.
A condition for diagnosing dyscalculia in a child is being (seriously) behind in arithmetic compared to classmates. Additionally, there should be no other disorder in the three-dimensional development that would result in the same symptoms.
Dyscalculia is often considered when pupils have persistent and remarkable difficulties with arithmetic skills and mathematics in spite of their intelligence. The difficulties of a pupil may manifest themselves as misunderstanding mathematics, or a remarkably high amount of calculation errors without lacking mathematical knowledge.
The term dyscalculia is less known than dyslexia. It literally means "being poor at arithmetic." A pupil that is poor at arithmetic suffers less concequences than one with reading difficulties, because arithmetic plays a smaller role in other subjects.