La discalculia evolutivaestudio comparativo de la producción científica en España e Italia

Resumo

OBJECTIVES. The main objective of this work has been that to make a bibliometrical analysis, an explorative/descriptive and comparative type, about the Italian and Spanish articles published in scientific reviews, in the period between 1995 and 2016, about the theme Developmental Dyscalculia. METHOD. First, in order to do this, through a research made on Google Scholar, we have done a selection of all the articles published on the subject: a corpus of 94 articles of which 50 Italian,43 Spanish and 1 Italian-Spanish. Then, we have individualized and studied different variables, some of which have involved all the articles in a transversal way (Country, Language, Author, Number of authors, Affiliation, Number of citations, Name of disability, Field of study, Journal, Disciplinary area, Typology of article, Researched aspects), others, instead, for their type (Methodology, Width of the sample, Criterion of diagnosis, Class attended, Instruments for the Analysis and Diagnosis). Beginning from these variables and from their modalities they have made a list of data with the help of the programme SPSS Statistics Data Editor (IBM). At last, the data so obtained have been elaborated and analysed in the form of lists of frequence and contingency. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS. The results have pointed out that the language mainly used by Italian authors to spread their researches has been the English one, probably because they have published more in journals with an International circulation and specific for learning disabilities, while the Spanish ones have preferred their own language, probably because the journals on which they have published their articles are mostly Latin-American. 2014 has been the year in which have been published the larger number of articles, with 11 articles (11,7%) while in 1996 and in 1998 the production stopped. With reference to the disability of calculation, the Italians have talked more about Developmental Dyscalculia, while the Spanish about Dificultades en el Aprendizaje de la Matematicas. Most articles have been published in an academic field and the Universities that have produced the most in the temporal arch considered, have been the University of Padua (the 13,8% of articles) and Valencia (10,6%). The aspects that have resulted more inquired are the “Cognitive processes at the base of calculation”, both for the Italian and the Spanish authors. In the articles of empiric type, the authors have studied more a sample of small dimensions (comprised between 1 and 50); they have preferred a methology of research in a transversal way and have used a criterion very accurate to include the children of the group with difficulty (in 30%), but on the other hand, the Spanish ones have preferred a criterion not much accurate; nevertheless, among the Spanish articles there is a great extent of them. We cannot date back this datum. The instruments used for the analysis of discalculia have been different for the two countries: the Italian authors, to evaluate mathematical abilities, have applied most the AC-MC test by Cornoldi et al., whereas, for intellegence, the PMA test by Thurnstone & Thurstone; the Spanish authors, on the contrary, have applied mostly the BADYG test by Yustè and WISC by Wechsler.