Math and Technology	Lesson 2: Readings (1)	-

The Effects of Instruction in Solving Mathematical Word Problems for Students with Learning Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis

Xin, Y. P. and Jitendra, A. K. (1999).
Journal of Special Education, 32, (4), 207-225.

Abstracted by Krista Fritz Rogers

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Mathematics performance of students of all ages and abilities across the country is a cause for concern. Students with disabilities are no exception. Word-problem-solving is a particular issue, especially as this skill relates to an increasingly technology-driven society and economy. This article presents a synthesis of research findings related to word-problem-solving by students with learning disabilities (specifically, those with mild disabilities and those at risk for mathematics failure).

The authors performed a meta-analysis of 25 published and unpublished outcome studies to examine instructional effectiveness. The 25 studies were a mix of group-design and single-subject studies. Factors include student characteristics, instructional features, methodological features, and skill maintenance and generalization components. Meta-analysis is a statistical analysis technique that looks at a group of empirical studies and quantifiably summarizes the combined findings and characteristics of the whole.

More than half of this paper's narrative is devoted to detailing the statistical methods and specific statistical results of the meta-analysis work itself. Tables provide effective summaries of the 25 individual research studies as well as statistical results of the meta-analysis.

For most practitioners, the heart of this paper is the discussion and conclusions related to five key questions, which the authors used to drive their work: (1) What is the general effectiveness of word-problem-solving interventions, such as strategy training and computer-aided instruction (CAI), for teaching students?; (2) Is the effectiveness of the intervention related to student characteristics (such as IQ or classification label)?; (3) Are treatment outcomes related to instructional features, such as setting, duration of intervention, and word-problem task?; (4) Is there a relationship between effect size and features of the methodology (including whether the study was published or unpublished, and whether groups were matched or randomly-assigned)?; and (5) What is the effectiveness of word-problem-solving instruction in fostering skill maintenance and generalization? Are these functions of instructional features, such as treatment length?

Instruction in word-problem-solving generally improved the students' skill maintenance and generalization. CAI and strategy training were particularly effective. (CAI primarily involved tutorial or video disk programs.) Relatively speaking, CAI appears to help maintain a skill while strategy training had an edge in promoting generalization (such as moving from online to paper-pencil tasks).

With regard to instructional features, longer interventions (longer than one month) produced greater benefit that shorter-term treatments; individual instruction is more effective than group instruction; and interventions that involve simple, one-step word problems produced higher levels of performance than multi-step word problems or mixed problems. Higher levels of student-directed intervention also enhanced maintenance and generalization.

The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for further research in the area of word-problem-solving instruction.