Influence of instruction in mathematics for low performing students on strategy use

Gender-related effects of contemporary math instruction for low performers on problem-solving behavior

“…The more able (i.e., the girls) would then be fit for GI and unfit for DI. This would also explain earlier results favoring DI (Timmermans & Van Lieshout, 2003) because in that study the number of boys was higher than the number of girls.…”

“…The earlier research concerned the teaching of subtraction to children in special education (Timmermans & Van Lieshout, 2003), who are considered to be lower achieving pupils than the children in the current study. In the earlier study, it was assumed that the children in the GI setting, who were shown to have acquired more strategies, were unable to apply these on transfer problems and got confused.…”

“…In contrast, several experimental studies give evidence that direct instruction (DI) of only one strategy leads to better results for children with learning problems attending special schools than guided instruction (GI) in which children were stimulated to propose and use multiple strategies (Milo & Ruijssenaars, 2002;Timmermans & Van Lieshout, 2003). In these studies, the difference between direct instruction (DI) and guided instruction (GI) was considered to reflect a major and characteristic distinction between traditional and constructivistic teaching.…”

“…The same model over both conditions was chosen to rule out model-effects. The first phase was identical to the first phase in Timmermans and Van Lieshout (2003) where details about the materials used can be found.…”

Social Working Memory: Neurocognitive Networks and Directions for Future Research

“…Arguably, complex mentalizing depends on some form of working memory: when considering and attributing mental states to the self and others, people must access, maintain, and manipulate information about the person (self or other) and draw some sort of conclusion about their related mental state. This is similar to the idea that when solving a math problem, people must access and hold representations of the numbers to be manipulated in order to derive an answer (Siegler, 1987, 1988; Geary and Burlingham-Dubree, 1989; Geary and Wiley, 1991; Geary et al, 1993; Ackerman, 1996; Timmermans and Van Lieshshout, 2003; Bjorklund et al, 2004) – and indeed, arithmetic computation is inextricably linked to working memory (e.g., Geary et al, 2004; Wu et al, 2008; Meyer et al, 2010). …”