Maintenance in Mathematics for Individuals with Intellectual Disability: A Systematic Review of Literature.
Prompting plus visual or hands-on aids is the only combo shown to keep math skills in learners with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team hunted for every solid study on keeping math skills in people with intellectual disability. They kept 22 papers that ran real experiments in school or clinic settings. All studies had to test if the skill was still there days or months later.
What they found
Prompting came out on top. Every study that used prompts plus pictures or hands-on items kept the math skill over time. Other tricks like songs or coins helped, but only when paired with prompts. No single method worked alone.
How this fits with other research
Lincoln et al. (1988) saw the same thing with laundry skills. Students kept the steps for eight weeks when teachers used concurrent chaining plus prompts. The match shows prompting is the glue for any life skill, not just math.
Van Herwegen et al. (2018) got six-month math maintenance in low-achieving preschoolers without ID. They used symbolic games, not prompts. The gap hints that learners with ID may need the extra support of prompts to hold on to skills.
Meuret et al. (2001) found that kids with mild ID kept community skills better than kids with moderate ID. Jiyoon’s review did not split results by IQ level, so future work should test if prompting helps moderate ID as much as mild ID.
Why it matters
You can stop the “learn today, gone next month” cycle. Add a quick prompt trial at the end of every math lesson. Use picture cards, number lines, or real coins. Check again after a week, then a month. If the learner needs help, give the prompt again. This small step costs no extra time and keeps hard-won skills alive.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Despite the growing attention being paid to teaching mathematics for students with disabilities, the existing research tends to focus on mathematical skill acquisition, but not on skill maintenance. The researchers in this study reviewed all studies from 1975 to 2018 that involved teaching mathematics to individuals with intellectual disability. A total of 135 studies met inclusion criteria, but only 53 studies involved a maintenance phase (39.2%). Among the 53 studies, only 22 were included for the final analysis, after evaluating their methodological rigor. In those 22 studies, there was no consensus among researchers on the standards for conducting a maintenance phase (i.e., latency between intervention and maintenance phases, length of maintenance phase, number of maintenance sessions). Further, in the studies which included a maintenance phase, the most widely taught mathematical content was numbers and operations. All studies employed intervention packages which included more than one instructional method and/or materials and the most widely used instructional method was prompting while the most widely used instructional materials were visual supports and manipulatives. The results suggest that prompting is an evidence-based practice for individuals with intellectual disability in supporting maintenance, while explicit instruction, time delay, feedback, and instructional sequence (e.g., the virtual-representational-abstract instructional sequence) are potentially evidence-based practice for individuals with intellectual disability.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2020 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2020.103751