Young children have been taught simple sequences of alternating shapes and colors, referred to as "patterning", for the past half century in the hope that their understanding of pre-algebra and their mathematics achievement would be improved. The evidence that such patterning instruction actually improves children's academic achievement…

The differences between learning disabled (LD) and non-LD children's problem-solving protocols were analyzed during a picture arrangement task. Although the groups of 29 LD and 27 non-LD children were comparable in global mental processing and task performance, LD children had difficulty with representing problems and deleting irrelevant…