Brain, Digital, & Learning

 Open access, Peer Reviewed

Indexed in KCI

pISSN 2384-2474
eISSN 2586-7490

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Examining the Effectiveness of Virtual Manipulatives based Instructional Sequence to Support Adding Fractions to Students with Developmental Disabilities

Changwon National University

Correspondence to jpark@changwon.ac.kr

Brain, Digital, & Learning. Volume 13, Number 1, 37–49, March 2023. https://doi.org/10.31216/BDL.20230003
Received on January 13, 2023, Revised on March 16, 2023, Accepted on March 21, 2023, Published on March 31, 2023.
Copyright © 2023. Institute of Brain based Education, Korea National University of Education This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Learning fractions is important for both academic and functional mathematics. However, many students including students with developmental disabilities struggle with solving mathematical fractions problems. To support students with developmental disabilities in learning fractions, the purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the virtual manipulatives based instructional sequence on the acquisition and maintenance of computations with fractions(i.e., adding fractions with unlike denominator). A total of three middle school students with developmental disabilities participated. Using a multiple probe design across participants, a functional relation was found between the intervention and the accuracy of solving adding fractions problems for each student. All students acquired the targeted skill and maintained their performance up to three weeks.
Keywords

Virtual manipulatives, evidence-based practice, fractions, developmental disabilities

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