Math Achievement On The Rise: Here's How To Keep It Up

Students with disabilities are showing marked improvement in math learning, according to a recent study. And there are a number of strategies your school can use to continue to move math scores in a positive direction.

Students with disabilities are making giant academic leaps at the fourth-grade level, and in most cases they have made gains that far outpace those made by students who do not have disabilities, found a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) study. The percentage of students with disabilities performing at or above basic, proficient or advanced levels in fourth-grade math has doubled from 30 percent to 60 percent (versus a 16-percent improvement for students without disabilities), the study detailed. 

What can you do to make sure your students continue to see this degree of improvement in math? Our experts have some valuable suggestions, based on the instructional level of your students.

Primary Education: Get Concrete

At the earlier stages of math learning, students struggling to make sense of the relationship between ideas, things and symbols often face a particular challenge when it comes to math. Teacher practices can sometimes inadvertently deepen these challenges.

Problems can arise from teachers "asking students to match pictured groups with number sentences before they have had sufficient experience relating varieties of physical representations with the various ways we string together math symbols, and the different ways we refer to these things in words," warns Kate Garnett, PhD, chair of the Department of Special Education at Hunter College-CUNY, who has written extensively on the subject.

Reason: Because pictures are semiabstract symbols, if introduced too early, they easily confuse the delicate connections being formed between existing concepts, the new language of math and the formal world of written number problems, Garnett contends.
Solution: Move away from picture representations toward items, making concepts literally more substantial. "The fact that concrete materials can be moved, held and physically grouped and separated makes them much more vivid teaching tools than pictorial representations," Garnett says.

Secondary Education: Look For Nontraditional Instructional Tools

The conventional methods for having students practice their newly acquired math skills can often be counterproductive for students with disabilities, says Robin H. Lock, PhD, program coordinator of the special education program at Texas Tech University.

"Often students' confusion about the conventions of written math notation are sustained by the practice of using workbooks and ditto pages filled with problems to be solved," Lock argues. "In these formats, students learn to act as problem answerers rather than demonstrators of math ideas."

Good idea: For students who show particular difficulty ordering math symbols in the conventional vertical, horizontal and multi-step algorithms, offer exercises to help them translate from one format to another, suggests Lock. For example, teachers can dictate problems (with or without answers) for students to translate into pictorial form, then vertical notation, then horizontal notation, she says.