An Examination of Two Accommodation Methods for Improving Fraction Performance in Students With Math Difficulties

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  In Roundtable Session: Inclusion and Accommodation in Educational Assessment SIG Roundtable

Abstract

Students’ abilities with unit coordination in whole number multiplicative reasoning are a prerequisite for students to learn fractions. This study examined the effects of two accommodation strategies aimed to help students with MLD construct the concept of units and improve their fraction performance. We compared the fraction skills of 21 middle-schoolers with MLD on three tests: A baseline test without accommodations, a modification test with highlighted key words and written prompts, and a combination test that provided warming-up paired multiplicative reasoning problems. While we found that highlighting keywords and adding written prompts did not make a difference, students did better when a fraction problem was presented after working on related multiplicative reasoning problems than working only on fraction problems.

Authors

• Dake Zhang, Rutgers University

• Pengdong Li

• Bianca Di Dolce

• Ru-de Liu, Beijing Normal University