How autistic children learn maths

[januarysnowdrop]

I'm interested in finding out more about people's experiences of how autistic children learn maths. I'm wondering whether, for some of them, the dominant model of maths learning in mainstream schools (keep it real, very hands-on, practical maths, number lines, chunking etc) just doesn't work, and they might be better off with a more old-fashioned, abstract, numbers on the page sort of maths teaching.

I don't have any real evidence for this hunch, other than knowing one autistic 11 year old who has found old fashioned column addition much more logical than number lines etc, as well as the sense that all of those university mathematicians who are on the spectrum must have learnt maths the old fashioned way.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

No, just interested. I'm a teacher, although I'm very part time at the moment and don't teach any maths at all! I'm very interested in how autistic children learn and how teaching can be better targeted to their needs.

Dd2 is only 4 and at sp sch but today I had two tins of beans took one to heat up and she said there's one which would indicate she will do well with using real objects etc for teaching

In my limited experience (ie my own children ) I would say that dd1 (severe ASD and learning difficulties) has needed the concrete, hands on object-based number work and maths. It's all just meaningless to her without it.

Dd2, on the other hand, (AS, no learning difficulties, in fact reasonably advanced across most areas) I think it can be quite a distraction and muddling. She doe seem to need it so entires, but ti can quickly become the focus of her attention, rather than the maths being the focus, and so the actual 'learning' can get lost in the doing, iyswim. However, when presented with 'actual' maths as it used to be - the abstract, numbers on a page, she quickly finds the patterns, and can learn it much more easily. An example would be - we were learning times tables, and when practising she suddenly said 'so, times tables are the opposite of division, aren't they? So if 7x6 is 42, then 42 divided up into 7 piles would be 6 in each one, wouldn't it?'. She is 7, and has struggled with maths this year (year 2) at school, although not at home. At school, she was being taught division as 'sharing out' and was struggling to visualise it all. Once she made the connection between times tables and division (obviously for whole numbers -we'll see what happens when fractions come into it!) it suddenly clicked, and she found it far easier to deal with the numbers involved, rather than the sharing out side of things.

As I said, it's just my experience with my 2. An interesting thought, though.

I'm more interested in people's own personal experiences than in generalisations, to be honest. Perhaps my OP wasn't clear enough.

I do realise that children with autism vary!

Are you teaching maths to an autistic child at the moment?
Poltergoose is right - it depends on the child.
Support is supposed to be based on need and not diagnosis.

I don't think objects are an issue. Visuals can be helpful.

I think it is all of the random language, groupwork, discussions, etc. that go with the hands-on stuff that make it so distracting and confusing.

My child never did very well with pictures and pictures for social stories. He finds visual timetables a pita because it distracts from him getting the information in a way that he takes it in best. For years they were insisted upon and the more he got confused, the less verbal communication they gave him and the more pictures they gave him.

In truth, you just have to tell ds 'We're going to do this, then this, then this, okay?' and he'll get it.

If you do words AND pictures, that is probably the worst, as he can't for the life of him figure out why that picture means that thing you just said because an obvious picture of a bike to explain a bike ride just wasn't obvious to HIM. His brain is wired differently.

DS can't rote learn his times tables.

But he gives the illusion of it because he can do fast mental calculations.

It probably doesn't matter how he arrived at the answer provided he is fluent though.

But asking how children with autism learn maths, is probably very similar to asking how girls learn maths.

They'll be one or two aspects that might enable them to engage with the topic more than boys but really, it would be impossible to make any kind of conclusion and create a curriculum on the basis of it.

The most significant aspect of teaching a child, ANY child, is to have motivated them to start and to continue to engage them throughout by keeping the pace and direction stimulating and rewarding. This is likely to be individual in nature.

It's not something that you can generalise. DS1 just "gets" it. His party trick in nursery was asking what year someone was born and then telling them how old they were. DS2, OTOH, who is severely language delayed, with severe learning difficulties, spots patterns in things and has recently learnt to count into the hundreds. He will notice if he doesn't have all 7 of a particular object and hunt for what's missing, but I'm not entirely sure that he knows how much "seven" of something is. He's 8. With his current skills profile, a number line will probably be the way that he learns to add up.

And for every child with an ASD, in the normal range of cognitive ability, like DS1, there's probably one with dyscalculia, like my brother.

DS struggles when he learns a subject then moves on and then revisits the first topic in greater detail. Autism support recommended that he learn his tables in one lot, rather than a couple of tables each year as per the National Curriculum. She said it was common for autistic children to want to learn everything about a subject and then close the door on it, as it were. This is contrary to the way subjects are taught.

Many thanks to those who were happy to share their experiences, and apologies to the poster who felt I was using this board inappropriately. Mainstream teachers get very little training in special needs education, and I was interested in exploring whether any patterns might emerge from a discussion about how best to approach teaching maths to autistic children. But I'm sure you're right and there are no patterns - it just depends on the individual. Thanks again.

Gestalt learning, Sunnymeg. DS2 does a lot of that. He decided one day, after a couple of days watching Alphablocks on a repeated loop, that he could spell. And he can. He will probably start year 4, in September, with a whole new set of skills that no one had any inkling he could do.

zzzzz language is most definitely DS2's limitation. It's an ancient 1-25 number square on the school yard that whetted DS2's appetite for counting. His 1:1 made him a 0-99 square and he's worked out for himself how easy counting in 10s is. My Clarks shoe gauge has introduced him to counting in 5s.... I'm sure I could quite easily have him doing what DS1 did aged 3-4 and count in 3s, 4s, 7s etc if I could find something visual to set the pattern for him. I would use door numbers for odd and even numbers, but they're sequential and not alternate in our village! Even more confusingly, the high street is divided into typically northern terraces, so the numbers go something like 6 5 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 as there is no logic, whatsoever, to the layout!

His speech limitations make it difficult for him to communicate, too. He likes to tell me his sequences and have me repeat. I indulge slowly and clerly and he does spend some time trying to "hear" the words. I picked up on his "bebeh" (seven - the first visibly numbered checkouts in both our local Sainsburys) then got distracted by some angry DS1 ranting. DS2 then spent several minutes repeating "beh....bey....behr..." over and over, trying to make himself understood, until I remembered the conversation we'd started and that he was saying "eight".

For my DS
Super at rote learning did all his times tables at once but can't calculate only memorise. (Star we should put our two together!)
We have been advised to pick one method for each operation and stick with that, I think DS would prefer old fashioned methods although he can do number lines etc, I suspect the grid method will not work for him ( I don't like it either, prefer long multiplication). He learns things as rules.
DS can memorise sums and produce answers to questions he's seen before with no calculation. But he can't calculate a similar sum in his head, he relies on memorising
He loves patterns - maths, door numbers, alphabet, words of song or book anything which is a string of information that never changes, so while he knows his times tables it's not a useful bank of information, to him it's just a string of familiar info
This knowledge can't be easily applied to a problem. He struggles with the application of maths.
Maths language is a huge pita. He can process a sentence with 3 key words, maths word problems have about 20.
Then there's the phrases used - subtraction, take away, less than, fewer it takes him ages to learn all the language variations. That's before you add in john with his three red bricks and jane with her four green bricks and blah blah blah.
He def needs hands on maths to make his bank of info functional. Tens and units made sense when he had to cash in 10 blue straws for 1 red straw.
Also one method won't always work, numicon was great for addition, but for subtraction it was rubbish as he still wanted to add the 2 groups together when you were only supposed to count the difference. So straws worked better for subtraction. I often find teachers get stuck and think I must use numicon as he has autism and I've been on course about it, but fail to use other methods when it's not working.
So I think you need to be flexible and if it's not worked teach it a different way, even with the same child what works for one skill won't work for another. You need a bank of approaches and keep working through them until you find the best one.
And agree with zzz teach one thing at a time, all this dipping in and out and cycling back to things is hopeless. Teach one thing to completion then move on, don't leave things half finished even if that's the way you do it with the other children.

DS2 (Y7) learned best by discovering his own methods. He has a natural feel for numbers, but often he says the answer appears fully formed in his head, so he then has to sort of work backwards to the question in order to come up with some sort of working to write down. Teachers like it when you write down your working. He got a silver in the UKMT junior challenge this year and is hoping for a gold next year. Current weakness: multiplying and dividing decimals.

OP if you're looking into the different ways that children learn maths Steve Chinn's 'The trouble with Maths/More Trouble with Maths' are useful for exploring different ways of learning.
Many children with ASD will also have SPD, which will impact on their ability to learn within a busy classroom.
Perhaps looking at the classroom environment might help?

I'm going to have to have a look to see which ones are available on Android (and pester DH to install them on his nook) or work well with an iPod screen, zzzzz. We've not made much use of his iPod, yet, and I'm determined to keep it purely as a learning and communication device. He associates his nook with entertainment, but numbers are pretty damned entertaining at the moment!