Adaptação e Validação de dois Questionários para rastreio da Discalculia

Abstract

Dyscalculia is a specific learning disability recognised in the DSM-V (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), with significant deficits in mathematics and arithmetic, affecting between 3% and 6% of the world's population. This disorder affects daily life, from simple tasks to professional tasks. Currently, in Portugal, there are no specific assessment tools for dyscalculia, and this study focuses on the validation and adaptation of two questionnaires for European Portuguese. The questionnaires we adapted were the Colorado Learning Difficulties Questionnaire (Willcut et al., 2011) and the Adult Arithmetic History Questionnaire (Sury & Gaab, 2020). The first focuses on the difficulties that parents observe in their children in different areas of learning. The second focuses on the parents' history with mathematics from childhood to adulthood, based on evidence pointing to family origins in dyscalculia. The data were collected in a group of schools, totalling 72 mothers and 63 fathers. The results established a relationship between the responses reported in the questionnaires about the children and about the parents, revealing that parents who reported more difficulties in mathematics also reported difficulties in mathematics in their children. Through confirmatory analysis, the first questionnaire revealed good psychometric qualities in the adaptation of all the factors it assesses. In the second questionnaire, the psychometric qualities proved to be less satisfactory; however, this questionnaire is still being developed by the original researchers, so we offer suggestions for its validation here.