Monday, March 22, 2010

Effective Mathematics Instruction!

“Can you do addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

—Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass

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The “imperfect ability to…do mathematical calculations” accurately describes how LD affects many students. However, not all children with LD have math troubles, and not all children with math troubles have a learning disability. The commonality of interest here, then, is trouble with math, not what disability a child may have. That’s one very good reason to look beyond labels and focus on what teachers can do, instructionally speaking, to support students who are struggling in math.

We know a great deal about effective math instruction for students with disabilities, especially students who have LD. There have been five meta-analyses on the subject, reviewing a total of 183 research studies (Adams & Carnine, 2003; Baker, Gersten, & Lee, 2002; Browder, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, Harris, & Wakeman, 2008; Kroesbergen & Van Luit, 2003; Xin & Jitendra, 1999). The studies combined in these meta-analyses involved students with a variety of disabilities—most notably, LD, but other disabilities as well, including mild mental retardation, AD/HD, behavioral disorders, and students with significant cognitive disabilities. The meta-analyses found strong evidence of instructional approaches that appear to help students with disabilities improve their math achievement. We now also have the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report (2008) that further investigates successful mathematical teaching strategies and provides additional support for the research results.

According to these studies, four methods of instruction show the most promise. These are:
* Systematic and explicit instruction, a detailed instructional approach in which teachers guide students through a defined instructional sequence. Within systematic and explicit instruction students learn to regularly apply strategies that effective learners use as a fundamental part of mastering concepts.

* Self-instruction, through which students learn to manage their own learning with specific prompting or solution-oriented questions.

* Peer tutoring, an approach that involves pairing students together to learn or practice an academic task.

* Visual representation, which uses manipulatives, pictures, number lines, and graphs of functions and relationships to teach mathematical concepts.

Read more here...

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