NCT03354481: PROCEDYS

Automatization of Counting Procedures in Children With Dyscalculia

Completed NA Last updated 12 September 2025

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Arithmetic facts solving in Dyscalculia in 3 participants. Completed in 19 September 2019.

Timeline

12 July 2018

Primary endpoint
19 September 2019

19 September 2019

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Hospices Civils de Lyon
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	na
Design	single group
Masking	none
Primary purpose	other
Enrollment	3
Start date	12 July 2018
Primary completion	19 September 2019
Estimated completion	19 September 2019
Sites	1 location across France

Drugs / interventions tested

• Arithmetic facts solving

Conditions studied

• Dyscalculia — all drugs for Dyscalculia →

Sponsor

Hospices Civils de Lyon — full company profile →

Who can join

Adults 8 to 11, any sex, with Dyscalculia. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

Researchers in numerical cognition usually think that the greatest and most common difficulty in children suffering from dyscalculia is retrieval of arithmetic facts from long-term memory. However, we have recently shown that retrieval might not be the optimum strategy in mental arithmetic. In fact, expert adults would rather solve simple problems such as 3 + 2 by automated and unconscious procedures. Therefore, we hypothesize that children with dyscalculia might not present deficit in retrieval but, instead, in counting procedure automatization. The aim of the current project is to test this challenging position. Through a longitudinal approach, we plan to precisely examine the behavior of children suffering from dyscalculia over a 3-year period. Children will be aged between 8 to 11 years at the beginning of the study and we will precisely observe the evolution of their solution times when they solve simple addition problems involving one-digit numbers. If children with dyscalculia still struggle with simple additions three years, their solution times plotted on the sum of the problems should still follow an exponential function. Indeed, if counting is not automated, difficulties necessarily increase with the progression on the number line or the verbal sequence, hence the exponential function. On the contrary, if counting procedures tend towards automatization, moves along a number line will progressively become as easy at the beginning of the line as at the end, hence the linear function. Importantly, a retrieval model would predict exactly the inverse pattern because, according to this model, the linear function, which is unanimously considered as the hallmark of counting procedures, should progressively be replaced by a non-linear function through practice.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.