The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of enhanced anchor instruction and traditional problem instruction in improving the problem-solving performance of 42 seventh-grade students with and without disabilities in general education classrooms. Qualitative research strategies embedded in a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control-group design permitted investigators to describe and compare the problem-solving performances of individual students with disabilities in general education settings. Previous research has suggested that students with disabilities can solve math problems that are meaningful and motivating in remedial settings; however, few studies have examined whether those improvements can be achieved in general education classrooms. Results of this study indicated that the students without disabilities profited from contextualized instruction, but benefits for the students with disabilities were equivocal. Explanations for these findings are offered, and implications for instruction are described.

High content standards, special education legislation, and new considerations regarding curriculum are pressuring teachers to improve the intellectual quality of students' learning experiences. In mathematics, students are expected to develop more sophisticated problem-solving skills at an earlier age. To date, there is little research to show how to accomplish this objective with students who have been unsuccessful in math. This study describes how students in a remedial math class fared in comparison to prealgebra students on video-based and applied problems aligned to current math standards. Results showed that students in the remedial class matched the problem-solving performance of students in the prealgebra classes. Accounts of individual performances elaborated how students' understandings evolved and provided important implications for instructional practice.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of video-based, anchored instruction and applied problems on the ability of 11 low-achieving (LA) and 26 average-achieving (AA) students to solve computation and word problems. A repeated-measures design with staggered baselines was used to compare the performance of two groups of LA students and one group of AA students across three instructional conditions: (a) baseline instruction, (b) anchored instruction, and (c) instruction with applied problems. The performance of all three groups was higher during anchored instruction than during the baseline condition, but no differences were found between instruction with applied problems and the baseline condition. Qualitative analyses revealed that some LA students made fewer errors on computation and word problems during the anchored condition, whereas other students continued to make the same procedural mistakes. The findings suggest that some LA students can improve their procedural math skills as they work on solving engaging problems but other students need more explicit instruction to improve their computation skills and basic math understanding.

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