Mathematics for Dyslexics and Dyscalculics, 4th Edition

4Testing and Diagnosis

Teaching and diagnosis are inextricably intertwined. If you are working with an individual student, then a diagnostic approach to teaching must be inevitable. You need to appraise the student’s skills and deficits in mathematics as an ongoing activity. As soon as teaching begins, diagnosis begins.

It is the authors’ experience that children often know more than most tests reveal; for example an algorithm may be almost mastered, but a small misunderstanding causes failure and it is only the failure that is noted. As we have said before, intervention often needs to start further back than one might initially think, but not necessarily always from square one, and testing should bear this in mind and try to find the optimum place to start the intervention.

If you are working with a group of students you can still build in an ongoing diagnostic approach to much of the work you do by designing at least some of the exercises, worksheets and tests you use to give you that diagnostic information. One way of doing this is by examining error patterns (Engelhardt, 1977; Ashlock, 2010).

After considering some theoretical background, this chapter suggests a testing procedure. There could be many other equally valid procedures (e.g. Dowker 2001) and any procedure should be flexible enough in structure to respond to the child’s answers rather than rigidly following a fixed protocol.

Chinn (1992) has discussed the use of testing, in particular the benefits and disadvantages ...