| Over the last two decades, students in Singapore consistently scored above students from other nations on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS; Provasnik et al., 2012). In contrast, students in the United States have not performed as well on international and national mathematics assessments and students with disabilities are not performing as well as their peers without disabilities (NAEP, 2015; Provasnik et al., 2012). In the 1980s, Singapore's Ministry of Education designed Singapore Math (Singapore Math Inc., 2014) as the national curriculum for students in Singapore (Ginsburg, Leinwand, & Anstrom, 2005). As part of Singapore Math, the Singapore Model Method (SMM) is a problem-solving heuristic used to solve math word problems. Currently, very little research supports the use of SMM for problem solving (Mahoney, 2011; Ng & Lee, 2009) and at this time, there are no studies that evaluate the use of SMM for problem solving with students with disabilities. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the SMM with explicit instruction on math problem solving skills of students at risk for or identified with learning disabilities. The researcher designed a nine-stage instructional format that used explicit instruction to teach SMM to seven students to solve single-step math word problems. This study used a multiple probe across participants with an embedded ABCDE design. Students were taught to solve addition and subtraction word problems as well as multiplication and division word problems. Results of the study demonstrated a functional relation between SMM with explicit instruction and all students' mathematics problem solving skills for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division word problems. Between the pretest and posttest, all students demonstrated major improvements on problem solving skills. Social validity results for students indicated that most students found the steps easy to follow. Discussion of the results as well as specific contributions of the study, limitations of the study, recommendations for future research, and implications for practice are included. |
