Teaching Multiplication with Regrouping to Students with Learning Disabilities

The Common Core Standards require demonstration of conceptual knowledge of numbers, operations, and relations between mathematical concepts. Supplemental instruction should explicitly guide students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) in these skills. In this article, we illustrate implementation of the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) sequence and the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) for teaching multiplication with regrouping to students with SLD. CRA combined with SIM has been shown to be effective in teaching computation for students with SLD, specifically for developing conceptual understanding. Four elementary students with SLD participated in this study. The researchers used a multiple-probe design to show a functional relation. Students demonstrated increases in computational fluency; skills were maintained and generalized.