Math Learning Disabilities in Students With Dual Exceptionalities

Twice-Exceptional Students and Learning Disabilities

Students who are talented yet also have learning disabilities — often called twice-exceptional learners — possess exceptional talent or giftedness and are capable of high performance, but they also have some form of learning disability that makes certain aspects of academic success challenging. These students are frequently regarded as underachievers, and this underachievement may stem from a lack of inspiration, poor self-concept, or traits that are perceived negatively, such as laziness. As school becomes more demanding, their academic challenges may intensify to the point where they fall sufficiently behind their peers that a disability is eventually suspected.

Even though these students may appear to be doing reasonably well, they are, unfortunately, not performing up to their potential. As assignments grow increasingly challenging in subsequent years, and without the support needed to accommodate their areas of weakness, their academic difficulties typically escalate to the level where a learning disability may be suspected — yet their full potential is rarely recognized. Students with learning disabilities show consistent and significant discrepancies in their ability to develop long-term memory representations of essential arithmetic facts, or in retrieving those facts after they have been learned (Geary, Hoard, Nugent, & Bailey, 2012).

Mathematical Language and Instructional Materials

Varied concrete materials are appropriate for different teaching purposes. Materials do not teach on their own; they work in combination with teacher guidance, student involvement, and repeated explanations and demonstrations by both teachers and students. Frequently, student confusion about the principles of written mathematical notation is reinforced through the use of ditto pages and workbooks filled with questions that require solving. Through these formats, students learn to be problem answerers rather than genuine demonstrators of mathematical concepts.

Many students with learning disabilities are specifically hindered by mathematical language, leading to confusion over terminology, difficulty following oral explanations, and poor oral skills when attempting to articulate the steps of complex calculations. Students with language discrepancies tend to treat mathematical problems on the page as signals to perform an operation rather than as meaningful sentences that must be read and understood. It is almost as if they deliberately avoid verbalizing the mathematics (Ostergren, 2013).