Schools test number blindness to help children sooner

A pilot project testing number blindness among schoolchildren could eventually lead to a standardised test for use in schools across Denmark, DR reports. Marie Juul, 20, hopes it will help other children avoid the struggles she faced.

Juul had always found it difficult to interpret numbers. As a young supermarket cashier, she could not read numbers aloud to customers. She also struggled to understand decilitres and centilitres when cooking, and had a poor sense of time.

But it was not until upper secondary school that she discovered her difficulties at school and in everyday life were linked to number blindness.

“I could not understand mathematics, and eventually I became afraid of the subject. For much of my life, I thought I was simply too stupid and was not working hard enough to learn it,” Juul said.

She said she was “almost crying with joy” when she learned that she was number-blind.

“It would have meant an enormous amount to me if I had found out sooner what the problem was,” she said.

Juul said the experience had severely affected her self-esteem because she had spent so long believing she was stupid. Earlier specialist help with mathematics might also have made her academically stronger today, she said.

Test could become national standard

Several schools are currently testing an assessment for number blindness among pupils. The test could eventually become a standardised tool available to all schools across Denmark.

The project is led by the Forum for Mathematical Difficulties, which estimates that between 3 and 6 per cent of Danish pupils are number-blind. There is no precise figure for how many pupils in Denmark have the condition.

Bent Lindhardt, project manager at the forum and one of the test’s developers, said it was essential to understand the difficulties individual pupils face.

“I have almost never spoken to anyone with number blindness who has not experienced people around them perceiving them as stupid and lazy,” he said.

The test consists of a questionnaire with five different types of tasks. One task shows an image with five dots. Pupils with a good understanding of numbers will quickly identify how many dots there are, while pupils who struggle to understand quantities and numbers will answer more slowly.

Pupils who score poorly in the first test may then take part in an individual assessment with a teacher or adviser. They may be asked to show how they solve a calculation and explain how they arrived at the answer.

The overall assessment also considers whether other factors could explain a pupil’s difficulty with the test, such as the child feeling unwell or having a more general learning difficulty.

Calls for greater recognition

Lindhardt said number blindness had not received the same recognition as dyslexia, for which a national test and many assistive tools are available, including in workplaces.

“It is therefore extremely important to recognise the difficulties faced by people with number blindness,” he said.

All municipalities and municipal and independent primary schools in Denmark have been invited to take part in the project.

The project is funded by the Egmont Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation and TrygFonden, and will run until 2028.