Devising an Instructional Program to Teach Arithmetic Problem-Solving Skills to Students with Learning Disabilities

This article details a process to develop and test an instructional program designed to teach students with learning disabilities to solve four kinds of arithmetic story problems. The program was developed in response to the recognition that some students who have adequate reading and computation skills lack the procedural, process, and task-specific knowledge necessary to solve these problems. In the course of developing the unit, the literature on information processing, mathematics education, and instructional theory provided important guidelines for content and teaching approaches. Both single subject and group research designs were employed to test the effectiveness of the problem-solving unit.