The poor achievement of secondary students with learning disabilities in mathematics is often affected by prior low achievement, low expectations for success, and inadequate instruction. Good instruction involves careful selection of examples; explicit instructional design; a parsimonious use of time and resources; and techniques such as direct…

Sixty-one adolescents with learning disabilities received clear or unclear instructions from an adult before completing the Rorschach Arrangement Task and a test of abstract thinking. Adolescents receiving clear communication performed significantly better and used more efficient cognitive strategies than did adolescents in the unclear…

This study, involving 9 students (ages 8-11) with learning disabilities, found that 1 session of self-instruction training was not sufficiently powerful for students to learn a strategy for solving arithmetic problems, but a second session and access to tape-recorded cues resulted in improved performance. Effects did not generalize to student…