In a week in which SATs tests have been all the rage, literally, in social and mainstream media, a question about clarity in the expression of number might be deemed apposite.
The following two paragraphs are from a report on the work of the Cerebra Foetal Research Project at the University of Barcelona. Pay attention to the numbers. Do they confuse you or is it just me?
One in ten children has neurodevelopmental problems. It is estimated that about two thirds of these are of prenatal origin and in most instances, the problem occurred during foetal life, long before labour started. Severe forms of brain damage affect about 2/1000 of all new-borns and are expressed by serious complications including cerebral palsy and/or intellectual disability.
The vast majority of brain problems, however, are manifested as subtle developmental disturbances. These cases are not associated with overt brain injury, but with brain reorganisation and are expressed mainly as alterations in cognition, thus affecting behaviour, social relations, neuromuscular regulation, learning and memory. The impact of these ‘milder’ neurological alterations in the quality of life cannot be overemphasized. Because they are of milder nature, they mostly go unnoticed in early months and even years of life.
“One in ten”, “about two-thirds”, “about 2/1000”, “the vast majority”: four different ways of expressing numbers of children in two short paragraphs; three of them in the first paragraph. Like me, you probably felt these were powerful statements, the sort that might be used in lobbying our politicians, for instance.
Personally, however, I find it rather confusing.
What, for instance, is “about two thirds” of “one in ten”?
The answer, if you scale it up to 1000, is, of course, about 66. One in ten gives 100 out of 1000. “About two thirds” of 100 is about 66. So, in every 1000 children: about 100 have neurodevelopmental problems, 66 of which are of a pre-natal origin and 34 are post-natal.
Or, again, how many children have “severe forms of brain damage”?
For a moment, you might be tempted, as I was, to answer “about 2/1000” but that would be incorrect. “About 2/1000” refers not to the numbers of children but to the number of “all new-borns”; or, in other words, the 66 in 1000 whose neurodevelopmental problem originates before or at birth.
So, off the top of your head, what is 2/1000 of 66?
The answer is very small indeed: 0.132 children or, to put it differently, 1.32 children in 10,000, have “severe forms of brain damage”.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe you can show me I have the maths wrong. But that, I suspect, would only prove my point. Like many others, I suspect, once I tried to read the two paragraphs carefully, I became all the more confused, such that resorting to an Excel spread-sheet did not really ease.
Why does this matter? Why do the numbers matter? Why does this matter to me? Because, along with my passion for conductive education, my core interest lies with the services available to that tiny proportion of children with “neurodevelopmental problems” “expressed by serious complications including cerebral palsy and/or intellectual disability” in their early years, their school years and their lives as adult citizens, and to their families.
How many are there? And, then, how should we advocate and lobby for them?
This post continues as: "If We Can't Do The Maths On Neurodevelopment Problems, Can We At Least Agree On The Words?"