Asha K. Jitendra, Ph.D., Rodney Wallace Professor for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning in the Department of Educational Psychology will be a keynote speaker on the topic of mathematics instruction for struggling learners at the Taiwan Academy of Learning Disabilities (TALD) 10th annual conference on March 22, 2014. In addition, she will conduct a seminar for researchers (i.e., faculty members and graduate students) and one half-day workshop for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers working with students struggling in math.
Many students, especially students struggling in mathematics, have persistent difficulties solving word problems. These students may have cognitive skill deficits in working memory, language, and attentive behavior that negatively impact their learning. Reasoning and problem analysis skills are the foundations to problem solving. This session will focus on strategy instruction that uses visual representations to teach basic (problems involving the additive problem structure) and more advanced problem-solving skills (e.g., ratios, proportions, and percents).
The session will illustrate the application of strategy instruction that primes the underlying problem structure to develop students’ general problem-solving skills. Emphasis will be on the use of visual representations that help students focus on the relationship between quantities central to many mathematical problems.
Jitendra’s keynote presentation and graduate seminar will be on: Meeting the needs of elementary and secondary students struggling in mathematics: Strategy instruction and visual representations.
