Five-Session Design Aims to Teach Future Teachers to Spot Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia remains a learning difficulty that is often misattributed to low ability in classrooms. Children who struggle to grasp number sense, compare magnitudes, or retrieve basic arithmetic facts are too often labeled as simply weak at mathematics, when in fact their difficulties reflect a specific condition that cannot be explained by low intelligence, poor teaching, or adverse environments. A new study published in Discover Education argues that the problem begins long before teachers enter the classroom: most teacher education programs treat dyscalculia as a definition to memorize rather than a set of observable behaviors to interpret and act upon. Researchers Aysu Karademir and Derya Girgin have now built and expert-tested a five-session instructional design intended to move preservice teachers from merely knowing what dyscalculia is to making justified instructional decisions for students who show its warning signs.

The term dyscalculia derives from the Greek dys, meaning bad, and the Latin calculare, meaning to count, so it literally translates as bad counting. Its early signs are identifiable as developmental risk indicators: weak number sense, difficulties in counting and magnitude comparison, problems retrieving basic arithmetic facts, and trouble linking numerals to quantities. Crucially, the literature emphasizes that these indicators are not uniform. They vary across developmental stages and across everyday contexts. Early identification is widely regarded as a prerequisite for timely pedagogical support, yet a growing body of research shows that both preservice and in-service teachers have limited awareness of dyscalculia and often struggle to distinguish its indicators from general mathematical difficulty.

According to the study, existing dyscalculia content in teacher education is frequently fragmented and largely definitional, offering little guidance on how teachers can translate diagnostic information and learners’ lived experiences into pedagogical action. The authors frame dyscalculia awareness not as declarative knowledge of a definition but as a teacher’s capacity to notice developmental and behavioral risk indicators, interpret them pedagogically, and use those interpretations to inform instructional decisions. Their starting point was the need for a holistic design that supports preservice teachers not only at the level of knowing but also at the level of pedagogical reasoning and action, closing the long-debated gap between what future teachers learn at university and what they actually do in classrooms.

The theoretical backbone of the design combines teacher cognition theory with practice-based teacher education. Teacher cognition research holds that teachers’ cognitive processes strongly shape their instructional practices and, by extension, their students’ academic performance, and that programs targeting only behavioral change are insufficient. Within the new design, cognition is examined through the lens of teacher noticing, which unfolds across three interrelated stages: attending to relevant mathematical behaviors and error patterns, interpreting what is noticed in relation to dyscalculia risk indicators, and making and justifying an instructional decision. Each stage is made observable through candidate-produced artifacts and matching assessment evidence, such as scenario-completion tasks, case analyses with KWL charts, and station-based adaptation materials evaluated against product-oriented criteria.

Practice-based teacher education supplies the second pillar. Its central argument is that preservice teachers struggle to integrate university coursework with the instructional practices they eventually enact, so preparation must include representations of practice, decomposition of practice into observable components, and approximations of practice of increasing authenticity. The design operationalizes these ideas through expert videos, film analysis, and case and scenario reading as representations; through role-play, RAFT tasks, and station-based adaptation design as approximations; and through practicum experiences where feasible. The authors stress that this framing distinguishes their activities from generic active learning and positions practice-based work as a theoretically grounded design principle rather than a slogan.

The resulting instructional sequence is deliberately staged. Session one establishes conceptual foundations of dyscalculia and confronts common misconceptions. Session two trains recognition of developmental risk indicators. Session three turns to role-based analysis of the academic and everyday experiences of individuals with dyscalculia. Session four addresses pedagogical interpretation of diagnostic information, enriched with expert perspectives. Session five culminates in the design of multimodal and technology-supported instructional adaptations. Where direct practicum work with students diagnosed with dyscalculia is not available, the design can be substituted with video cases, anonymized student work, or structured case vignettes, making it transferable across institutional contexts. The authors also produced a conjecture map that makes explicit how design features are expected to trigger mediating processes, such as noticing and interpreting, and yield anticipated outcomes including structured dyscalculia awareness, professional preparedness, and the ability to justify instructional choices.

Methodologically, the study sits within Type 1 design and development research, aligned with educational design research, and followed an iterative cycle of principles, draft, expert review, revision, and final product. The draft design was appraised by a focus group of five faculty members from a faculty of education, purposively selected to cover the domains the design needed to be judged against: one specialist in specific learning difficulties including dyscalculia, one instructor of a learning difficulties course, two experts in instruction development, and one measurement and evaluation specialist. The discussion was audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed with a framework approach combining deductive coding along predefined appraisal dimensions with inductive coding of emergent points. The two authors coded independently and resolved discrepancies through consensus, and every expert comment was traced to a specific design decision in a revision log serving as an audit trail.

The expert appraisal yielded a broadly positive verdict with constructive refinements. Across four evaluation domains, the five experts judged the five-session progression coherent and its rationale sound, while identifying areas for improvement in the elaboration of objectives, the diversification of practice-based activities, the alignment of assessment with active learning, and the clarity of the lesson plans. One representative example involved the first lesson plan, where experts asked for clearer presentation of the developmental risk indicators shown by individuals with dyscalculia; the authors responded by adding new content covering the definition, characteristic features, symptoms by developmental stage, early identification, and the diagnostic process. Most notably, the feedback prompted a shift toward process- and performance-oriented assessment, suggesting that the experts’ central concern was whether preservice teachers’ reasoning would become visible and assessable rather than merely assumed.

The study’s outputs are designed to be reusable rather than purely theoretical. The supplementary materials include five session-level lesson plans, activities organized by developmental stage and instructional focus, and assessment tools such as a self-assessment rubric for group work performance and an instructor observation checklist. Together with the conjecture map and the documented revision log, these artifacts are intended to give teacher educators a resource they can adapt to their own contexts and to provide a basis for future empirical testing. The authors recommend that dyscalculia awareness be integrated into teacher education programs sequentially and progressively rather than confined to single-session informational activities, that case pools reflect diverse symptom patterns given the developmental and individual variability of the condition, and that structured assessment determine whether candidates have achieved sufficient awareness before entering professional practice.

Important limitations temper these contributions. The design has not been piloted in real classroom settings, so its impact on preservice teachers’ conceptual knowledge, pedagogical reasoning, and instructional adaptation skills has not been empirically tested; the findings concern the design product and its expert-appraised qualities, not measured effects on learners. The expert panel came from a single university, and no perspectives from preservice teachers, practicing teachers, or classroom observations were included, limiting multi-stakeholder evaluation. The design was also developed within a specific national and institutional context, restricting direct generalizability to programs in other countries or with different course durations. The authors call for mixed-method pilot studies combining pre-test and post-test measures with qualitative process data, such as scenario-based decisions, adaptation materials, and reflective journals, to explain the mechanisms underlying candidate learning. Until such evidence accumulates, the study stands as a carefully documented, theoretically grounded blueprint, one that argues developing dyscalculia awareness may depend less on how much information future teachers receive than on how systematically their noticing, interpretation, and decision-making are supported and made visible.

Subject of Research: A practice-based instructional design for building dyscalculia awareness in preservice teacher education

Article Title: Developing and appraising a practice-based instructional design for dyscalculia awareness in preservice teacher education

Article References: Karademіr, A., & Girgin, D. (2026). Developing and appraising a practice-based instructional design for dyscalculia awareness in preservice teacher education. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02358-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02358-0

Keywords: dyscalculia, teacher education, preservice teachers, instructional design, teacher cognition, practice-based teacher education, learning difficulties, design research, expert appraisal, assessment, mathematics education, conjecture map