Advancing the Math Skills of Low-Achieving Adolescents in Technology-Rich Learning Environments

The purpose of this project is to implement, test, and refine the most effective ways of helping low-achieving students develop their computation and problem-solving skills in mathematics within the context of a teaching method called Enhanced Anchored Instruction (EAI). Previous research clearly showed how EAI could improve the problem solving skills of adolescents but still unknown is the best way to integrate explicit basic skills instruction (e.g., fact retrieval, fractions computation) with EAI, especially among students with learning disabilities (LD) and/or emotional disabilities (ED). The question of how best to integrate instruction of higher- and lower-order math skills is important because many teachers of low-achieving students are reluctant to teach challenging math problems before they have mastered basic skills, which often leads students to dislike mathematics and drastically reduces to their motivation to learn it.