Brian Bottge

The goals of this grant were to develop, test, and refine a set of assessment tools for measuring the conceptual understanding and procedural math skills of middle school students with math difficulties (MD). Traditional measurement methods for assessing problem solving do not effectively capture what students with MD know and are able to do in mathematics. Despite best efforts on word problem-solving items, many are still unsure of what test items are asking. Test formats also do little to ...

Research on interventions for secondary students with learning disabilities in math is limited. It has been estimated that between 5 to10 percent of students have a specific learning disability in math. Difficulties in math performance are often attributed to a combination of weak problem-solving, such as identifying relevant information, and computational skills, such as basic operations involving fractions. Research has suggested that students with disabilities in math gain, on average, on...

In this project, researchers planned to implement, test, and refine the most effective way to teach both problem-solving and basic skills to low-achieving adolescents using a teaching method called Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI). At the time of this study, research showed that students with learning disabilities (LD) gain, on average, only 1 year of achievement in math for every 2 years they are in school.  The researchers believed they could help address this gap by providing informat...