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Twelve first-grade teachers participated in a staff development effort designed to provide them with opportunities to examine ways to teach the first-grade mathematics curriculum from a problem-solving perspective using a Cognitively Guided Instruction framework. Another group of 12 first-grade teachers and their classrooms comprised the comparison group. The percentage of minority students in these 24 urban classrooms ranged from 57% to 99%. Teachers in the experimental group taught arithmetic through the use of word problems, and their students spent considerably less time on skill worksheet drills. Instruction in experimental classes focused on the process that students used in their solutions rather than on the production of written answers to exercises. Students in experimental classes performed significantly better in solving word problems as well as completing number facts.
Villaseñor et al. (Fri,) studied this question.