Accessible Math Education
for Dyscalculia
Research and design to help students with dyscalculia learn math easily
Winner of the 2024 Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge
Scope
Time: 6 months
Team: Individual project
Methods: In depth interviews, Digital Ethnography, Usability Testing
Tools: Dovetail, Figma
Approximately 6% of the population have a math-related learning disability - dyscalculia. This impacts their ability to work with traditional mathematics - specifically writing and comprehending mathematical notations.
Currently, accommodations for university level math are limited for students with learning disabilities, deterring them from pursuing a career path with math prerequisites and dealing with math in their every day life.
For my Capstone project, I explored this space further to understand how we can help students with dyscalculia work through math.
PROBLEM
Students with dyscalculia struggle with traditional math instructions. This makes it difficult for them to pursue higher education
6%
of the population has dyscalculia
2/5
students with dyscalculia pursue higher education
13%
of those students pursue math related courses
PROCESS
Where do we start?
The project included three primary phases
Define Scope
Secondary research and digital ethnography to narrow down the problem space
Discovery Research
In depth interviews with students with dyscalculia to identify pain points
Test Solution
Usability testing to ensure
user-friendly designs
PHASE 1
Defining project scope
To define the project's scope, it was important to understand the research done on dyscalculia and how people with dyscalculia navigate math currently. For this, I conducted two research activities
Secondary Research
A deep dive into past research on dyscalculia in the fields of education, psychology, and cognitive science.
Digital Ethnography
I crawled Reddit and other online forums for discussions on dyscalculia. My observations here were non-participatory.
Notes shared by students with dyscalculia showcasing how they take notes
After 10 days of reading and scrolling, I found out -
01
What having dyscalculia really means
People with dyscalculia mainly face issues with comprehending mathematical notations, and processing numerical data (how big is a number?)
02
What is important to help students learn better
Using senses is important to understand and learn math - students use color, touch, sound to understand math notations and meanings. Keeping meticulous notes of everything they learn is very important.
03
Tips and tricks that students use currently
The primary strategies used by students currently is keeping a log of notations they find confusing, spacing out problems to avoid confusion, and rewording problems to make them easier to work with
04
The structure of math learning in higher education
Students primarily work with math on two levels - writing notes on mathematical concepts and working through instructions provided during classes. Proper note-taking is important to learn efficiently.
05
That techno-solutionism is not it (obviously)
Students with dyscalculia are already well-equipped to learn math and find solutions that cater to their needs. Technology is needed not to invent a new solution, but rather to make the existing solutions faster and efficient.
All insights lead to note-taking
The groundwork narrowed the project scope to
help students with dyscalculia to take notes efficiently
The next phase of the project focused on understanding how
students with dyscalculia take notes. The goal was to build a concept that addresses student needs.
PHASE 2
Discovery Research
To dive deeper into note-taking, I conducted 7 semi-structured interviews
Participants
4
students with
dyscalculia
3
Subject matter experts
1
Math Instructor
Students were recruited from Reddit via an open call, while subject experts were contacted by email after finding their information online.
Questions
Their experiences with university math learning
Their experiences with problem solving and note-taking
What problem solving strategies worked best for them?
What are the necessary skills that students need to learn in math?
What challenges do instructors face while working with students with dyscalculia?
The interviews were transcribed and coded using dovetail, they were then grouped in three major themes -
Differentiate between
mathematical writing
Students need an easy way to differentiate between the different types of notations that they need to work with
Keep a track of
notation and meanings
Students often create their own notes to track the meanings of each notation. However, keeping this log and referring to it is challenging
Frequent communication
with instructor
Students rely on help from their
instructor as they write and learn from their notes
Based on these insights, I created a design concept - a note taking app that -
DESIGN DETAILS
Turning Insight into Action
Differentiate between mathematical writing
Findings
Students feel confused between different notations
On an average, a page of math notes has many notations, making it difficult for students to read through
Students need different anchors on a page to help them parse through the different types of notations
Design concept
The application automatically color codes the notes as the student writes
The colors are decided based on the nature of the notations and the student is able to change and modify it the way they want
Keep a track of notation and meanings
Findings
Students find it useful to keep a log of all the different notations that they come across
Such a log is useful, but time consuming to create and difficult to refer back to
Design concept
The application lets you log meanings of notations directly into your notes
Frequent communication with instructor
Findings
Students need instructors to continually review notes
However, this is challenging as its not always feasible to find time
Design concept
The application lets students and instructors add comments to the notes in real time.
The app only shows relevant parts of the notes to instructors to protect student privacy
The concepts were then turned into prototypes for further refining
PHASE 3
Usability Testing
Usability testing was conducted on 4 participants with dyscalculia.
Each participant was first given an explanation of the purpose of the project, how the application functions, and what the expected outcome is. They were then asked to perform 6 tasks on the app.
Finally, observations were made based on how the participants interacted with the application and where they struggled the most to complete the task.
A summary of all tasks and observations is below
SOME MORE TWEAKS
Design Changes
Side Panel: Styles and dictionary
Observations
All 4 participants needed hints to get to the side panel
Design change
Instead of a hidden side panel, a more visible side panel was created with icons for comments and dictionary. This reduces the number of clicks needed to go to the specific features and gives more clarity to the user.
Navigation Bar
Observations
3 / 4 were surprised when they had to go to the highlight section to add a comment
Design change
A comments icon was added to the navigation bar, making commenting and reviews more accessible to the user. The section also has a drop down that allows users to pick between viewing the comments, marking a review, or marking a comment.
Options displayed when the user long taps: Color Coding
Observations
3 / 4 participants clicked on the notation to change its color
Design change
Changing the color of the notations was also added as an option to the options tab displayed when a user long-taps on a notation. The user can then choose whether they want to change the color of that specific notation or all notations in the group.
LOOKING BACK
Reflections
Its all about the story
Through the 6 month project, I had the opportunity to present my work to a wide range of audience at different levels of fidelity and granularity.
It helped me refine my storytelling and helped me understand the importance of crafting engaging narratives from a vast amount of data
Going beyond design
I also had the opportunity to enter my project into the 2024 Cheng Wu Tech Innovation Challenge. The challenge evaluated concepts on their usefulness and technical soundness.
This pushed me to think about my project beyond a design concept. Building up the business case and technical details of the project helped me think about it more holistically.