Problem solving skills

The search for effective methods of improving problem-solving skills in adolescents with LD has become an important focus of research in recent years, especially as it has become clearer that deficits in problem-solving skills are superimposed on lower-order processing problems in areas such as spelling and computation. The purpose of this report was to synthesize and summarize the research on interventions conducted between 1963 and 1997. Fifty-eight intervention studies were analyzed according to the age and intelligence of the adolescents, the characteristics of the intervention (e.g. number of instructional interventions, components of instruction) and the methods used by the original investigators. It was hoped that this synthesis of the research literature would help identify instructional models for adolescents that predict success in improving problem-solving skills. It was clear from earlier research that not all interventions work equally well in this population of students, and two instructional methods seemed superior to others: direct instruction and strategy instruction. It was considered important to distinguish the points of commonality and distinction of these two approaches and identify the components of instructional models that predict the best outcome for adolescents with LD. For purposes of this study, direct instruction was categorized as those that employed the following techniques:

• Breaking down a task into small steps
• Administering probes
• Supplying repeated feedback
• Providing students with diagrammatic or pictorial presentations
• Allowing independent practice and individually paced instruction
• Breaking instruction down into simpler phrases
• Instructing in a small group
• Teacher modeling of skills
• Providing set materials at a rapid pace
• Providing instruction for individual children
• Having the teacher ask skill-related questions
• Having the teacher provide new materials

Studies included in this synthesis that were categorized as strategy instruction had the following components:

• Elaborate explanations
• Teacher modeling of processes
• Reminders to use certain strategies
• Step-by-step prompts
• Teacher-student dialogue
• Teacher asks process-oriented questions
• Teacher provides only necessary assistance

Is the magnitude of the beneficial effect related to certain components of the intervention?

Regardless of the overall model of instruction, only a few specific instructional components increased treatment effectiveness.

The following components predicted the magnitude of treatment outcomes: sequencing (eg, breaking down the task), step-by-step prompts; drill-repetition-practice; directed questioning and responses; individualization combined with small group instruction; segmentation (breaking down a targeted skill into smaller units and then synthesizing the parts into a whole); technology (e.g., computer use); and small interactive group instruction.

The drill-repetition-practice-review component was an important variable in predicting effectiveness.

An analysis of three recent research reviews brings the following issues and findings to the forefront of reading comprehension research. What is the role of self-monitoring in reading comprehension?

So-called active readers learn to monitor how well they understand what they are reading, as they read. When reading difficult material, these students engage in beneficial self-monitoring strategies such as rereading portions of the text and trying to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words central to understanding it. In contrast, students with LD often fail to realize that they must pay attention to how well they understand a text as they read so that they can go back and reread as necessary. Typically, students with LD must learn several self-monitoring techniques, such as asking themselves questions after reading a passage or summarizing in their own words the material they've read. While reading a story (a narrative text), they might try to predict what will happen next. Learning to make predictions helps reading comprehension.

The ability to reflect on how well a reading task is progressing is a critical component of reading comprehension. Students who are taught a number of strategies to use as they read, such as asking themselves questions as they read and summarizing what they read, generally experience more improvements in comprehension than students who are taught a single, specific comprehension skill. It is essential for students to learn "repair strategies" to use when they find themselves not understanding the text they are reading.

Repeated readings of a passage make it significantly easier for students to recall its important content. Repeated readings of the same passage is an easy strategy to implement in real classroom situations.

Although students with LD can be taught to use self-monitoring techniques, it is considerably more difficult for these students to generalize these skills, or apply them to other reading situations. Students frequently do not continue the comprehension strategies that they are taught after completion of the study unless they are asked to. It appears that intense, long-term interventions utilizing multiple self-monitoring interventions may be the most effective approach.

Students with LD process information inactively, and they have difficulty differentiating relevant and irrelevant associations. Possible solutions include techniques that force students to focus attention on the material being read and help them more readily identify the theme of a narrative.

Skills in discerning and using text structures (the way reading material is organized) are important to understanding texts. Students with LD have trouble learning about the structures of stories. In addition, they typically recall less about stories they've read and cannot easily identify the important information in stories. The most useful text structure is referred to as story grammar, which is the way narrative texts are organized. That is, there are characters, a setting, problems, solutions to the problems, etc. Students with LD know less about narrative text structure than other students. This lack of knowledge interferes with comprehension. Fortunately, narrative text structure can be taught, and when it is, comprehension improves.

Expository writing, the kind of texts found in newspapers and history books, for example, presents LD students with even greater challenges. Expository writing typically contains a variety of organizational or text structures that are more difficult to identify. Thus, the tactics that may help when reading stories, such as identifying the main story elements and processing them, are often less effective with expository texts.

Peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) improve comprehension and oral reading skills. In addition to having students reread text, PALS also has children work directly on comprehension by summarizing what they've read, identifying the most important information, and predicting what may happen next.

Although peer-assisted learning has shown strong benefits, additional research is necessary to determine whether peers have the skills to explain to another student how they handle the difficulties they encounter while reading. It's clear that students can help with practice and that practice is essential for internalizing strategies, but it's not clear to what extent proficient readers can actually teach less proficient readers.

H. Lee Swanson, Ph.D. University of California - Riverside

"http://www.ld.org/research/research_template.cfm"

Background and Purpose In the last 20 years, the number of children classified as having learning disabilities has increased substantially, from roughly three-quarters of a million in 1976 to more than 2.6 million in 1997. These children currently make up almost half of schools' special education population, yet it is still unclear which teaching strategies best help these children. Furthermore, a review of past literature reveals few systematic analyses of instructional approaches for students who have learning disabilities. This lack of clear direction creates confusion about how best to educate these students. Clearly, students with learning disabilities are a heterogeneous group and no general or single intervention can be recommended for these students. However, this report can offer recommendations from its investigation of evidence derived from many different studies on teaching students with learning disabilities. In this meta-analysis we synthesize research on the effects of various forms of instruction intended to improve students' academics (e.g., reading, mathematics), cognition (e.g., problem solving), or behavior (e.g., social skills). The meta-analysis includes 272 studies which met four criteria. Each study had to:

• Include learning-disabled students of average intelligence who were assigned to an experimental or a control instructional condition.
• Include information on how students with learning disabilities were selected.
• Explain treatment outcomes.
• Have no severe flaws.

We analyzed the effects for a range of studies that included both studies of a single area and studies that examined a mix of subjects across the following: instructional domains (e.g., reading, mathematics); sample characteristics (e.g., age, intelligence); intervention parameters (e.g., number of instructional sessions); and methodologies.

Findings This synthesis examining research conducted over the last 30 years produced several findings related to intervention for students with learning disabilities. Unless otherwise noted, these findings come primarily from the group-design studies. What forms of instruction were most effective?

The most effective form of teaching children with learning disabilities combined components of direct instruction (teacher-directed lecture, discussion, and learning from books) with components of strategy instruction (teaching ways to learn such as memorization techniques and study skills). The main instructional components of this combined model include:

sequencing (e.g., breaking down the task, providing step-by-step prompts); drill-repetition-practice (e.g., daily testing, repeated practice, sequenced review); segmentation (e.g., breaking down skills into parts and then synthesizing the parts into a whole); directed questioning and responses (e.g., teacher asks process or content questions of students); control of task difficulty; use of technology (e.g., computers, presentation media); teacher-modeled problem solving; small-group instruction; and strategy cues (e.g., reminders to use strategies, think-aloud models).

Of these components, the one most linked to effect on student achievement was control of task difficulty (where, for example, the teacher provided necessary assistance or sequenced tasks from easy to difficult.) Another influential component was the use of small interactive groups of five or fewer students. A third strongly influential component was the use of structured questioning and directed responses, involving, for example, interactive questions and answers or the teacher directing students to ask questions and summarize.

Children with learning disabilities perform closer to nondisabled (age-related peers) children when treatment includes strategy instruction. Not surprisingly, nondisabled students generally outperform learning-disabled students. Importantly, however, there was less difference between the performance of the two groups when learning-disabled students were exposed to treatments that included strategy instruction compared to competing treatments like direct instruction.

In the area of reading, both phonics and whole word (whole language) instruction make a significant contribution to student achievement in reading. Neither clearly supersedes the other in terms of transfer measures (reading real words and comprehending text).

Only a few instructional components successfully predict effects on student achievement. Although several instructional components seem to produce effects when studied independently (e.g., segmentation predicts outcomes on phonological measures), the results vary more widely when instruction reflects the variance shared across components. This happens because individual strategies typically do not appear in isolation in a classroom, and often their importance as predictors is enhanced in the context of other components.

Only studies in the areas of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and creativity met our threshold for having a large effect (when adjusted for differences in how the studies were conducted). We found moderate effects in the areas of cognitive processing (e.g., problem solving), word recognition, memory, writing, intelligence (e.g., performance on standardized tests), attitude/self-concept, phonics/orthographic skills (e.g., recognizing correct spelling), and global achievement (e.g., teacher grades, class ranking). We found relatively weak effects were found in the areas of spelling, mathematics, general reading, social skills, perceptual-motor processes (e.g., handwriting), and language processes (e.g., listening comprehension). However, single subject design studies found large effects in all subjects except for handwriting.

Treatment effects are specific to the academic problems being addressed. If you look across academic subjects, the most effective model was a combination of direct instruction and strategy instruction. However, its effect was greater in reading than in non-reading measures, such as mathematics and social skills. Within the field of reading, this model is particularly effective for reading comprehension compared to reading recognition. We also found that bottom-up instruction (direct instruction only) was more effective than top-down instruction (strategy instruction only) on word recognition, but not on reading comprehension.

Different ways of identifying whether a child has learning disabilities or not (using either cut-off scores in tests or variation between student achievement and that predicted by an IQ test) will affect achievement outcomes. The results suggest that studies that used a cut-off score criteria (at or above 84 and reading scores below the 25th percentile) found smaller effects from the treatment. For both group and single-subject design studies, the model combining direct and strategic instruction yielded higher effect sizes when cut-off scores can be computed than when they cannot. For single-subject design studies, the combined model yields higher effect sizes for the lower IQ discrepancy studies when compared to those studies that report discrepancies, but with relatively higher IQ scores.

Similarly, variations in how the studies were conducted can have a significant impact on treatment outcomes. Studies that account for differences from the control (non-treatment) condition in terms of setting (classroom and school), teacher, and number of instructional steps yield larger effects than studies that fail to control for such variations. A serious threat to interpreting treatment effects are studies that unfairly "stacked" the treatment condition with substantially more steps and procedures than the control condition. Here, although it was clear that how the study was conducted did have a strong influence on its findings, researchers found that there were still significant effects related to various types of treatment, even with controls for the methodological factors.

Researchers should investigate which treatment approaches are most effective and the causal processes by which they work. They also should pay attention to the interactions of instruction and learning disabilities characteristics.

Teachers should combine direct instruction with strategy instruction. They should focus on task difficulty, small interactive groups, and structured questioning and directed responses.

Teachers should match instructional techniques to the subject areas in which they are most effective. For example, reading comprehension should be taught with a combination of direct instruction and strategy instruction. Bottom-up instruction can be used for word recognition but not reading comprehension. Both phonics and whole word methods (whole language) should be used to teach reading.

This document was prepared for the Keys to Successful Learning Summit held in May 1999 in Washington, D.C. Keys to Successful Learning is an ongoing collaboration sponsored by the National Center for Learning Disabilities in partnership with the Office of Special Education Programs (US Department of Education) and the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (National Institutes of Health). The purpose of this initiative is to translate research and policy on learning disabilities into high standards for learning and achievement in the classroom, and to take action at the local, state and federal levels to ensure that all students, including those with learning disabilities, are afforded the highest quality education. Keys to Successful Learning is supported by a coalition of national and regional funders as well as a broad range of participating education organizations.