Exploring academic and cognitive skills impacting retention and acquisition of word‐problem knowledge gained during or after intervention

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated the impact of a word‐problem intervention in retention and acquisition of knowledge after the intervention ended. We based analyses upon Grade 4 students experiencing mathematics difficulty (average age at pretest = 8.77) who received one of two variants of a word‐problem intervention (with [n = 111] vs. without [n = 110] embedded pre‐algebraic reasoning instruction) and students within a business‐as‐usual condition (BaU [n = 127]) separately. Findings revealed that students who received the intervention not only tended to retain less, but they also showed more active knowledge acquisition after the intervention ended. Furthermore, word‐problem intervention altered the contributions of some prior knowledge and skills on both retention and acquisition.