Two researchers in CHEP's School of Education are beginning a study of children at risk for learning difficulties in math, with an eye toward improving classroom math instruction in early elementary school as well as enhancing teacher education programs.

David Kaplan, professor of education, and Nancy Jordan, associate professor of education, have received a five-year grant of $1.7 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for the study. Their research team will include graduate and undergraduate students and a group of teachers and administrators from urban and suburban schools in Delaware's Christina School District.

Jordan says many schoolchildren in the United States are failing or underachieving in mathematics, and as a group, they rank low compared with students in other Western nations. Despite those facts, she says, research on early math education has lagged far behind that on reading instruction.

"Children with math difficulties are understudied, especially in relation to studies of children with reading disabilities," Jordan says. "Students with reading disabilities get a lot of help early on, while students with math difficulties can go for years without assistance."

With mathematics as a vital tool in an increasingly technological society, she says, "We don't want to leave any child behind in math."

A key goal of the research project is to develop better intervention techniques that can be applied early, before a student is at risk of failure, Kaplan says. Early intervention is a much better way to solve a problem than later remediation, he says.

The researchers will try to identify precursors that might indicate children's future math difficulties as well as strengths. They are beginning the project this fall with kindergartners and will track the students' growth through third grade, when Delaware schoolchildren must take a state achievement test.

Jordan says previous studies have shown that in early elementary school, children with math difficulties who are good readers progress faster in math achievement than do children with both math difficulties and reading difficulties, regardless of their intelligence, income level, ethnicity or gender.

In contrast, children with reading difficulties who are good in math and children with both reading and math difficulties progress at about the same rate in reading achievement.

Reading difficulties, whether they are specific or general, tend to remain stable throughout primary school. Math difficulties, on the other hand, seem to be ameliorated by competence in reading, Jordan says.

She says researchers do not fully understand the impact of instructional intervention on the development of mathematical competencies in children with math difficulties, in part because most interventions in primary school target reading rather than math.

Jordan says that at the end of the five-year project, the researchers hope to be able to understand those students who ultimately fail at math. "We want to learn why and to develop techniques to help those children so we can prevent failure," she says.

Kaplan says the team, using state-of-the-art statistical methodologies, would like to pinpoint "the optimal intervention times for children and to develop a way to predict how they will do," as well as an assessment battery that schools can use as a tool to identify students at risk for math difficulties.

Kaplan says the researchers hope their findings "will be of value to teachers and students, both in the Christina School District and the state, as well as the larger community."

"What makes this research project interesting is there is a nice balance," he says. "We are conducting basic research because there are things we do not know, and we are also providing practical information that can help the school district and the state identify key intervention points for children with math difficulties."

--Neil Thomas, AS '76