A parent with her daughter at the math learning clinic on Tuesday.
Who can you turn to for help when your children have difficulty in learning math? A tutor? Maybe you should also consider a doctor.
The first outpatient math learning clinic at Shanghai Children's Medical Center opened on Tuesday, arousing curiosity from the public.
Various reasons such as attention deficit, poor neurodevelopment, mental problems, intelligence reasons, bad sleep, pressure, and aphantasia can all cause a poor math performance, medical experts at the center said.
Six students attended the clinic with their parents, all of whom complained about their children's poor math scores.
However, experts said only two children could be primarily confirmed as having a lack of special imagination and aphantasia, while the main problems of the other four were put down to attention deficit and anxiety.
At the clinic, doctors first conduct an assessment and then offer customized treatment and training.
"Targets for our clinic are those who have a poor sense of numbers like having trouble learning to count, poor math memory like having trouble doing basic computations and remembering formulas, poor inferential ability like having trouble in applying math skills to solve problems, and poor visual space like struggling to make sense of graphs and charts and geometry," said the clinic's Dr Ma Xiquan.
"Each child coming to the clinic should receive evaluation on their spiritual, behavioral and neurodevelopmental status. We will give individualized judgment and suggestions," he said.
"We can offer visual space training, abacus-based calculating training, mobility training, special imagination and some special educational games with VR and AR technologies."
According to international studies, difficulty in learning math, or dyscalculia, is a severe and persistent learning disability that affects about 3 to 6.5 percent of school-age children. Previous research in China also indicated an incidence of 3.3 to 6 percent.
However, a recent meta-analysis said about 8.97 percent of children at primary school in the mainland have the disorder, covering 11.57 percent in low grades, 10.07 percent in middle grades and 4.76 percent in high grades.
Low-grade students mainly have problems in calculation. As they get older, their math learning disorders will reduce along with an an improvement in calculation abilities.
The clinic is held on Tuesday mornings. Reservations are available on the hospital's public WeChat account. A registration fee is 316 yuan (US$45).
The clinic is fully booked for the next two Tuesdays.
