Mathematics
Evidence from low
performing adults undercuts the social myth that it is okay to
be low performing at math. The effects of math failure
throughout years of schooling, coupled with math illiteracy in
adult life, can be a serious hinderance to both daily living
and vocational prospects. In today's world, mathematical
knowledge, reasoning, and related skills are no less important
than reading ability.
Education specialists nearly all
agree that the key to the learning process, basic to both math
and numerancy fluency, is the ability to identify different
mathematical associations and that these concepts be in place
prior to the rote learning of facts. Students then stand
to benefit greatly from the consistent use of memory
strategies and the ability to consistently convert abstract
mathematical concepts into routine sequencing
arrangments. There may be no other single, organized
program affecting the root brain processes involved in this
combination of needs than the Learning Breakthrough
Program™.
Many younger children who have difficulty
with elementary math actually bring to school a strong
foundation of informal math understanding. They encounter
trouble in connecting this knowledge base to the more formal
procedures and symbolic notation system of school math.
It is quite a complex feat to map the new world of written
math symbols onto a student's known world of quantities and,
at the same time, learn an entirely new language to talk about
this arithmetic world.
Students need many repeated
experiences and a wide variety of examples to make these
connections strong and stable. Organized and efficient
brain processing ability is at the very heart of this learning
process and at the heart of the Learning Breakthrough
Program's™ learning aid approach.
As with reading
abilities, when math difficulties are present, they range from
mild to severe. While children with disorders in mathematics
are specifically included under the definition of Learning
Disabilities (LD), seldom do math learning difficulties cause
children to be referred for evaluation. In many school
systems, special education services are provided almost
exclusively on the basis of student's reading disabilities.
This relative neglect might lead parents and teachers
to believe that arithmetic learning problems are not very
common, or perhaps not very serious. However, approximately 6%
of school-age children have significant math deficits and
among students classified as learning disabled, arithmetic
difficulties are as pervasive as reading problems. This does
not mean that all reading disabilities are accompanied by
arithmetic learning problems, but it does mean that math
deficits are widespread and in need of equivalent attention
and concern.
Some LD students are particularly hampered
by the language aspects of math, resulting in confusion about
terminology, difficulty following verbal explanations, and/or
weak verbal skills for monitoring the steps of complex
calculations. Typically, children with language deficits react
to math problems on the page as signals to do something,
rather than as meaningful sentences that need to be read for
understanding. This again is a strategic area of learning
skills that the Learning Breakthrough Program is uniquely
suited to help address.
A small number of LD students
have significant visual-spatial-motor disorganization, which
may result in weak understanding of concepts, very poor
"number sense," specific difficulty with pictorial
representations and/or poorly controlled handwriting and
confused arrangements of numerals and signs on the page.
Students with profoundly impaired conceptual understanding
often have substantial perceptual-motor deficits and are
presumed to have right hemisphere
dysfunction.
Historically, the objective of teachers
for these students is to construct a strong verbal model for
quantities and their relationships in place of the
visual-spatial-motor skills that most people develop. The
Learning Breakthrough Program™ aims to strengthen these core
visual-spatial relationships and abilities so that work-around
solutions for mathematics teaching will be less
necessary.
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