Solving for Why: Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching Students Who Struggle with Math

Solving for Why offers educators the tools and guidance essential for successfully solving for why students struggle with mathematics. The step-by-step, RTI (Response to Intervention) – like approaches, focused on assessment and communication with students, help teachers gain insight into student understanding in a remarkably different way that recipe-type approaches that assume the same solution applies to learners with similar struggles.

With Solving for Why you’ll learn how to:

• identify a struggling math learner;
• develop theories for why a learner may be struggling;
• facilitate a Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) Assessment;
• implement an insightful Collaborative Study;
• conduct powerful student interviews;
• support learners who struggle with memory challenges, attention deficit disorder, and affective difficulties (math anxiety);
• differentiate instruction through a main lesson―menu lesson plan; and more.

Each chapter includes reproducible templates for ease in carrying out the assessments. A final section offers resources for supporting students who struggle with additive reasoning, multiplicative reasoning, fractions, and proportional reasoning. The reproducibles are also available in a downloadable, printable format.