Teaching Math to Students with Learning Disabilities: Key Strategies

Differentiated Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities

Effective mathematics instruction must be conveyed in a manner that meets the needs of all students. Differentiated instruction is a critical component of this approach. Students with diagnosed learning disabilities receive an Individualized Education Program (IEP) designed to address their specific learning issues and deficits. Presentation, response, timing (scheduling), and setting can all be addressed through differentiation. Memory difficulties — including auditory, visual, and motor processing deficits — as well as attention deficits, abstract reasoning issues, and organizational problems can all challenge students in mathematics settings, but each can be mitigated through thoughtful differentiated instruction (Ginsberg & Dolan, 2003, p. 87).

Classroom Assessment Methods

In-class assessment can take place in both traditional formative and performance-based ways. Formative assessment is used during the learning process so that the teacher can check in to see what the student has retained. This can be observational or take the form of quizzes or other graded formats.

Performance-based assessment, while it can take the form of conventional tests, also includes other methods beyond standard exams. Flexible interviews, for example, ask students to demonstrate what they have learned — such as how to solve a problem — either publicly in front of the class or in a private interview with the teacher. This approach allows the teacher to determine whether the student genuinely understands why he or she is performing certain steps, rather than simply executing them by rote.

Number and Operations: Building Computational Fluency

One of the principles of current mathematics education is that students should understand numbers, not merely how to manipulate them. Students who are computationally fluent are not simply efficient and accurate in their methodology — they are also flexible (Rathmell & Gabriele, 2013, p. 109). This means that students possess more than a basic skill set for completing mathematical worksheets; they must also know which skills to apply when confronted with a new computational challenge. New standards-based tests demand that students show how they arrived at an answer in order to assess comprehension. Students should understand that there are many different ways to find an answer. Flexibility is fostered by instructional strategies that present different representations of the same idea — not simply showing subtraction on paper, for example, but also physically representing it for the child. Innovative methods of representation generate new thinking strategies (Rathmell & Gabriele, 2013, p. 109). Both a conceptual sense of what numbers truly mean and procedural skills in manipulating them are required for children to flourish academically.

When teaching flexible approaches to computation, however, it is important that the instructor keep certain developmental factors in mind. Young children may not yet be able to grasp concepts such as the fact that regardless of the order in which something is counted, the total remains the same, because they have not yet reached the relevant developmental milestones (Rathmell & Gabriele, 2013, p. 112). Children with learning disabilities may face additional challenges, such as difficulty retrieving numbers from memory (Rathmell & Gabriele, 2013, p. 113).

Flexibility can also be especially valuable when educating students with special needs. Even if a student does not fully understand the abstract conception of a mathematical principle, concrete manipulation can help him or her begin to grasp the strategy. All students benefit from multiple approaches and forms of representation. Teaching more effective computational approaches in a step-by-step fashion can often produce notable improvements in learning outcomes (Rathmell & Gabriele, 2013, p. 122).