Teaching reasoning strategies to dyscalculic students with low working memory level ¹

Dyscalculic students believe they need to memorize mathematical facts. This is due to their inability to think flexibly and their lack of knowledge about the possibility of performing operations by structuring numbers. So, the aim of this study is to teach dyscalculic students to use reasoning strategies. The study employed an instructional experiment, a research design that enables the investigation of how mental processes evolve in student-friendly learning environments. Six fifth-grade middle school dyscalculic students participated. Before the implementation, we observed that none of the students employed reasoning strategies. Over a six-week period, the application included activities aimed at teaching reasoning strategies for dyscalculic students. The implementation resulted in students’ ability to understand the relationships between numbers in addition and subtraction operations and employ various strategies during these operations. This result suggests that applying appropriate interventions to dyscalculic students can lead to significant progress and the acquisition of reasoning strategies.