Numerical cognition in children with cerebral palsy.
Kids with CP—especially hemiplegia—show stable, dyscalculia-style gaps in number sense and memory that won’t close with extra worksheets alone.
01Research in Context
What this study did
de Freitas Feldberg et al. (2021) compared kids with spastic cerebral palsy to typically developing peers. They looked at number sense, working memory, and counting skill.
The team split the CP group further: hemiplegic versus diplegic. They wanted to see which subtype had the harder time with math thinking.
What they found
Kids with CP scored lower on every number task. The gap was medium-sized, not tiny, not huge.
Children with hemiplegia had the lowest scores. Their number sense and working memory looked like dyscalculia, not just slow learning.
How this fits with other research
Whitehouse et al. (2014) tracked CP kids for two years and saw math skills grow. They said good working memory predicted growth. Cristina’s team shows the same memory weakness, but calls it a fixed deficit, not a starting point.
Wilson et al. (2023) tested a big population and found almost half of CP pupils meet criteria for intellectual disability. Their larger, bleaker picture extends Cristina’s lab study to the real world.
Vanbinst et al. (2014) studied kids with persistent math learning difficulties. They blame symbolic number processing, not working memory. Cristina pins the problem on memory and number sense together. The two papers overlap but spotlight different gears in the broken math machine.
Why it matters
If you write math goals for kids with CP, screen working memory and number sense first. Hemiplegic clients may need visual supports and smaller set sizes. Skip massed drill; target the memory bottleneck with strategies like chunking and verbal rehearsal.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a 2-minute working-memory warm-up (e.g., repeat-back 3 numbers forward, then backward) before every math trial.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) often perform poorly in mathematics. It is not yet clear to what extent mathematics difficulties in this clinical condition are similar to those observed in developmental dyscalculia. To better elucidate this issue, we conducted an exploratory cross-sectional study with a sample of children and adolescents with congenital brain injuries and educational history of problems in Mathematics. Fifty students aged 7-15 years, of both genders (28 males) participated in the study, 31 with typical development (TD) and 19 of whom diagnosed with spastic CP. Nine had hemiplegia and ten diplegia. Assessment procedures included a neuropsychological battery covering numerical cognition (ZAREKI-R) and working memory (AWMA) skills, and a computerized task for comparing non-symbolic magnitudes as a measure of number sense. Despite average intelligence coefficient, participants with CP underperformed the TD in five of the 12 ZAREKI-R subtests, as well as in the number sense and working memory tasks. scores were lower among hemiplegic children compared to diplegic, numerical cognition was impaired in all CP group, unveiling a dyscalculia secondary to neurodevelopmental impairments. Therefore, we can consider that mathematical learning difficulties in CP as being heterogeneous and associated with the immaturity of neuropsychological functions, with consequences for the development of numerical cognition.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2021 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2021.104086