Educational Psychology

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definition are learning problems with no obvious origin. There is good news, however, from this state of affairs, in
that it opens the way to try a variety of solutions for helping students with learning disabilities.

Assisting students with learning disabilities

There are various ways to assist students with learning disabilities, depending not only on the nature of the
disability, of course, but also on the concepts or theory of learning guiding you. Take Irma, the girl mentioned above
who adds two-digit numbers as if they were one digit numbers. Stated more formally, Irma adds two-digit numbers
without carrying digits forward from the ones column to the tens column, or from the tens to the hundreds column.
Exhibit 7 shows the effect that her strategy has on one of her homework papers. What is going on here and how
could a teacher help Irma?

Directions: Add the following numbers.

42 23 11 47 97 41

+ 59 + 54 + 48 + 23 + 64 + 27

911 77 59 610 1511 68

Three out of the six problems are done correctly, even though Irma seems to use an incorrect

strategy systematically on all six problems.

Exhibit 7: Irma’s math homework about two-digit addition

Behaviorism: reinforcement for wrong strategies

One possible approach comes from the behaviorist theory discussed in Chapter 2. Irma may persist with the
single-digit strategy because it has been reinforced a lot in the past. Maybe she was rewarded so much for adding
single-digit numbers (3+5, 7+8 etc.) correctly that she generalized this skill to two-digit problems—in fact over
generalized it. This explanation is plausible because she would still get many two-digit problems right, as you can
confirm by looking at it. In behaviorist terms, her incorrect strategy would still be reinforced, but now only on a
“partial schedule of reinforcement”. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, partial schedules are especially slow to
extinguish, so Irma persists seemingly indefinitely with treating two-digit problems as if they were single-digit
problems.

From the point of view of behaviorism, changing Irma’s behavior is tricky since the desired behavior (borrowing
correctly) rarely happens and therefore cannot be reinforced very often. It might therefore help for the teacher to
reward behaviors that compete directly with Irma’s inappropriate strategy. The teacher might reduce credit for
simply finding the correct answer, for example, and increase credit for a student showing her work—including the
work of carrying digits forward correctly. Or the teacher might make a point of discussing Irma’s math work with
Irma frequently, so as to create more occasions when she can praise Irma for working problems correctly.

Metacognition and responding reflectively

Part of Irma’s problem may be that she is thoughtless about doing her math: the minute she sees numbers on a
worksheet, she stuffs them into the first arithmetic procedure that comes to mind. Her learning style, that is, seems

Educational Psychology 93 A Global Text