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.
Of course, to make use of this information, an educator would need to know much more about each approach. So let’s take a closer look.