Learning Disabilities and Students

¶ … Improve Mathematic Performance for Children With Learning Difficulties and Their Effectiveness

Students with learning disabilities face several problems. More often than not, these students advanced approximately one academic year for every two academic years they attended school. Strategies employed by teachers can have a major impact on enhancing this particular performance in all levels of schooling. The lack of comprehensive strategies and interventions students with mathematics disabilities end up considerably lagging behind compared to their peers. Statistics indicated that approximately 25% to 35% of students experience difficulty with math knowledge and application skills. Moreover, 5 to 8% of all students in school have such considerable deficits that influence their capability to solve computation problems (Sayeski and Paulsen, 2010). In accordance to Hott et al. (2014), strategy training has been beneficial to students with learning disability when learning math conceptions and practices. As presented in the article one of the strategies is RIDE, which was established by Mercer et al. (2011). This is a strategy used to help students with answering word problems. LD students that face problems with abstract reasoning, memory, reasoning, and attention skills may largely benefit from this strategy.

Teaching dissimilar strategies to children with disabilities assisted them in learning and retaining not just higher order conceptions and problems, but also simple mathematical facts. In particular, automaticity, which is the capability to undertake tasks devoid of occupying the mind the low-level details necessitated, is deemed significant for further development and understanding in math for children with learning disabilities. In accordance to Tournaki (2003), automaticity in math is taught either by means of drill and practice or through the direct teaching of a strategy. The author's study showed that it was useful and constructive to teach basic facts to students with learning disabilities via drill and practice. Tournaki (2003) posits that when students with disabilities are taught strategies, they are handed routine and practical knowledge that can be utilized in solving problems. Specially, in the research study, the author employed the minimum addend strategy. This takes into account students counting up from the higher addend the number of units itemized by the lower addend. This particular strategy was taught to both the students with and without learning disabilities and subsequently comparisons were made to both the students with and without learning disabilities that were taught through drill and practice. The outcomes of the study by Tournaki (2003) established that students with learning disabilities significantly improved solely in the strategy condition in comparison to the control and drill and practice conditions. Nonetheless, the study showed that solely students in the strategy condition came to be significantly more precise in transfer tasks, for students with and without learning disabilities (Tournaki, 2003).

Montague (2007) argued that students with learning disabilities shows significant issues with memory, responsiveness, and self-regulation. As a result, this has a considerably adverse impact on their performance in both math and reading. According to Montague (2007), self-regulation is considered to be a metacognitive function that is fundamental to being successful in academic. Specially, students with learnings disabilities are largely poor at self-regulation and therefore have to be taught unequivocally how to not only observe but also control their intellectual activities as they take part in academic tasks, for instance solving math problems. The author demonstrates that self-regulation strategies can be used to enhance the performance of students with learning disabilities with the math subject at the elementary, middle and secondary school levels (Montague, 2007).

Wisniewski and Smith (2002) present the touch math program, a series that accentuates the use of manipulatives and examine its efficacy. The authors elucidate that several students with disabilities face difficulties and challenges in employing manipulatives for the reason that they forget the amount already counted at the point where they are ready to transfer the solutions to their worksheet. However, with the touch math program, such students did not have to leave their question worksheets in order to record or write down their solutions. The students with disability were taught that each integer, from 1 to 9 had touch point that signifies the value of each particular integer. Wisniewski and Smith (2002) outline that this particular program employed three distinctive modalities, which take into account auditory, visual and kinesthetic. Imperative, when the math teachers utilize approaches for all styles of learning, then the students with disability attain the capacity to learn through their main modality and at the same time firming up and supporting the others. The outcomes of the research study indicated that all students employing touch math substantially enhanced their performance in accuracy as well as speed based on the tests undertaken prior and subsequent to the program (Wisniewski and Smith, 2002).