The objective of this study was to identify procedures used for counting by children with intellectual disabilities and to analyze the effects of an intervention program focused on teaching arithmetic facts. Participants were three children between eight and 12 years from a public school in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, whose students come mainly from low socioeconomic families. Based on the review of the literature on the cognitive processes involved in the solution of addition problems and the implications for teaching, we evaluated the efficacy of an educational intervention model as a resource for advancing the use of counting procedures. A ten-meeting program was implemented. These meetings were held once a week and lasted approximately fifty minutes. The proposal consisted of direct, explicit, and systematic teaching by means of instruction sequences, based on the counting procedures used by the students, who were evaluated at two different times (pretest and post test). We found that there was improvement in the counting procedures used by the children after the intervention, revealing that the program was effective. Even brief interventions, such as the present study, can bring important benefits for children with intellectual disability. Such benefits will be the basis of their future knowledge.
Special Education Arithmetic; Intellectual Disability; Pedagogical Strategies
