Essay On Learning Difficulties In Mathematics

Student’s Learning Difficulties in Mathematics at High School Level.

Beena George

National Institute of Education

Introduction

High school students with learning difficulties in mathematics make limited progress in mathematics. There have been several factors that contribute to their lower level achievement in mathematics which include their lower level achievement in middle school and primary school, lack of motivation for success and limited guidance.

Even though students with learning difficulties spend a huge amount of academic time working on mathematics (Carpenter, 1985), severe deficiency in achieving mathematics is seen. Several research studies have shown that huge amount students in high school failed to acquire basic operation skills and the application skills in mathematics. These basic skill deficiencies will spontaneously hinder their development in learning higher level mathematics skills and finally play a role in their achievement score in mathematics.

For high school students with learning difficulties the mode of instruction in mathematics will not be judged on how fast they can learn the basic skills. These students must be taught the generalization techniques and skills for problem solving in mathematics. It may not be an easy task for students with learning difficulties to acquire the generalization skills with ease.

Instructional Strategies

In the past researchers and professionals came to a conclusion that individual psychological differences resulted in the lower level achievement among students in schools. But recent research study reveals that instructions given to students play a major role in students’ success or failure. After having gone through many years of repeated failure these students are ful...

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...udents gaining good instructions. In short high levels of achievement in students with learning difficulties require good management of instruction.

Zigmond (1990) observed that teachers spend most of the time in classrooms allowing students to complete their worksheets. Though worksheets may be useful for practice they are not suitable for learning new ideas and skills. The other observation seen by her is the lecture format in high school which she feels in not effective. She also observed that in large classrooms students with learning difficulties are not managed well were they are unattended and most of the time they are off task and their failures to learn concepts go undetected. The remedy to all these problems would be support sessions by a special educator during lessons or after school support sessions by the subject teacher or academic support teacher.