Numeracy Recovery with Children with Arithmetical Difficulties. Intervention and Research

This chapter describes an intervention program that is based on the findings that suggest that arithmetic is made up of numerous components, and involves assessing and targeting individual children's specific weaknesses. It analyses a few specific components of arithmetic, and the relationships between them, in a group of children who were selected for having arithmetical difficulties. The children with arithmetical difficulties appeared in general to show some weaknesses in the components investigated: derived fact strategies, estimation and translation, as compared with unselected children in other studies. The groups may not be directly comparable, due to the time lapse and changes in the educational system since the studies of the unselected children but the figures suggest that the children in the intervention group used on average somewhat fewer derived fact strategies and make fewer reasonable estimates than the unselected children, and that this was especially true of those at the higher addition performance levels. Perhaps children at the higher addition performance levels were regarded by their teachers as arithmetically weak and needing intervention if they did have additional weaknesses in aspects of arithmetical reasoning. The studies of unselected children's translation do not assess the children's addition performance level but their translation performance as a group appeared to be somewhat better than that of the children with arithmetical difficulties. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.