Mathematics instruction for students with significant cognitive disabilities has historically focused on the functional uses of mathematics during daily living activities, such as paying for public transportation or buying food.   Federal education laws such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 require that the assessment of mathematical achievement, even for students with significant cognitive disabilities who are assessed with alternate assessments, be based on state academic content standards.  Thus educators of students with significant cognitive disabilities are faced with the challenge of creating lessons which both teach functional math skills and address academic content standards.

In 2000, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) provided a comprehensive set of mathematics standards. The NCTM listed five key areas of mathematics instruction: 

1. Number and Operations: the ability to understand and represent numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems (e.g., the number 36 is 3 tens and 6 ones);
2. Measurement: the ability to understand measurable quantities (e.g., time and money);
3. Data Analysis and Probability: the ability to collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer questions with appropriate statistical methods (e.g., calculating percentages, plotting data);
4. Geometry: the ability to analyze characteristics and properties of two- and three-dimensional shapes, apply transformation and use symmetry to analyze mathematical situations (e.g., length, width, area, and volume);
5. Algebra: the ability to understand patterns, relations, and functions of numbers, and use mathematical models to represent and understand quantitative relationships (e.g., x + 2 = 7, solve for x).

This study examined mathematics instruction for students with significant cognitive disabilities to see if skills representing the NCTM components were included in their instruction and how successful various instructional practices had been with this population of students. 

1. Of the five components of mathematics instruction examined, only two were commonly emphasized in the studies examined: measurement skills (e.g., counting money) and computation.
2. Students with significant cognitive disabilities are able to learn both specific target skills (e.g., matching shapes, counting money, graphing, and computation) and functional life skills involving mathematics.
3. Systematic instruction curricula were found to have moderate to strong effects for teaching students with significant cognitive disabilities mathematics.  However, since these curricula came in packages using various forms of instruction, prompting, and feedback, it was impossible to determine which components of each treatment package accounted for the greatest amount of the treatment's effectiveness.