Addressing the educational challenges of urban poverty: a case for solution-based research.

Introduction: Math achievement for economically disadvantaged students remains low, despite positive developments in research, pedagogy, and funding. In the current paper, we focused on the research-to-practice divide as possible culprit. Our argument is that urban-poverty schools lack the stability that is necessary to deploy the trusted methodology of hypothesis-testing.

Students with mild intellectual disability engaging in proportions word problems.

The researchers conducted a qualitative case study to describe the experiences of two seventh grade students with mild intellectual disability as they engaged in mathematics word problems involving proportions. The researchers analyzed student performance in large group settings and with individualized instruction to gain perspective on the students' tendencies with challenging mathematics content. During the teaching sessions in this study, one of the participants initially struggled with the proportions word problems, but demonstrated success after teachers connected new information in the tasks to students' long-term memory and utilized gestures and diagrams to facilitate the students' processing of information.

Access to seventh grade mathematics: A case study of two students with mild intellectual disability.

In the United States, students with mild intellectual disability (MID) are expected to access the general education curriculum and some of these students are required to pass the same high-stakes exams as students without disabilities. Research supports that students with MID can demonstrate success with mathematics after receiving interventions that emphasize the strategic use of visual representations. In this qualitative case study, the researchers describe the teaching methods of a seventh grade, special education teacher who heavily emphasized visuals, such as diagrams and gestures, in her instructional approach.