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These tools can be especially helpful for students with disabilities because they can improve their understanding of the abstract symbolic language of mathematics.
Students who struggle in mathematics often find it hard to connect visual and symbolic representations, but virtual manipulatives can help make these connections clear. In addition, virtual objects can be altered in ways that concrete ones cannot for example, the size, shape, and color of a block can be changed.
In many cases, this enables students to create more examples than they could with physical objects. Many virtual manipulatives also have the added benefit of providing students with hints and feedback, allowing them to practice on their own without teacher assistance. These features mean that virtual manipulatives can be especially helpful for students with language difficulties, including English language learners.
These students often have trouble explaining what they are learning in mathematics, but virtual manipulatives can help them clarify their thinking and share their thoughts with others. There are many virtual manipulatives to choose from. When deciding which ones to use in your classroom, remember to:. Used wisely, virtual manipulatives can be an excellent addition to your teaching toolkit.
They can provide students with opportunities for guided exploration, helping them build a solid understanding of mathematics concepts. They can also help students demonstrate and share their learning. Studies have evaluated the effectiveness of manipulatives as a tool in mathematics instruction. This form of explicit instruction moves students from concrete manipulatives to pictorial representations of those manipulatives, and from pictorial representations to abstract concepts.
Butler, Miller, Crehan, Babbitt, and Pierce compared the effectiveness of teaching fraction concepts to students with learning disabilities using a CRA approach versus a Representational-Abstract RA approach which starts with pictorial representations and then moves to abstract concepts without using concrete manipulatives.
Although both groups improved in terms of their understanding of fractions, the CRA group had higher scores overall than the RA group. A study by Witzel, Mercer, and Miller also supports the effectiveness of adopting a CRA approach to develop the basic mathematics skills of students with learning disabilities. Students were taught to solve algebraic equations using either a CRA approach or a traditional approach.
The study involved 34 matched pairs of students in Grades 6 and 7 who had either been diagnosed with learning disabilities or categorized as at risk for learning problems. Although both groups showed improvement after a four-week intervention, the CRA group significantly outperformed the group that had received traditional instruction.
The students were able to transition successfully to pictorial and ultimately symbolic representations of the problems. Bolyard and Moyer-Packenham conducted a quasi-experimental study to examine the effectiveness of virtual manipulatives in helping sixth-grade students make sense of integer arithmetic.
The results revealed that the use of virtual manipulatives helped students improve integer computation achievement. Reimer and Moyer investigated the performance of 19 third-grade students during a two-week unit on fractions that used virtual manipulatives. Related articles More from author. EdTech News. In global education race, U.
By Matthew Lynch. March 17, Best of the Best Lists. Each of these visuals highlights the mathematics inside the problem and helps students develop understanding of multiplication. Pictures help students see mathematical ideas, which aids understanding. Visual mathematics also facilitates higher-level thinking, enables communication and helps people see the creativity in mathematics. Mathematics is a subject that allows for precise thinking, but when that precise thinking is combined with creativity, openness, visualization, and flexibility, the mathematics comes alive.
Teachers can create such mathematical excitement in classrooms with any mathematics question by asking students for the different ways they see and can solve the problems and by encouraging discussion of different ways of seeing problems. For an example of visualizing algebra see here.
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