The Learning Disabled Child—Learning the Basic Facts

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Abstract
It happened. time and again—a learning disabled (LD) child frustrated by inadequate fact mastery. We faced the problem repeatedly in the Clinical Teaching Center and in other classroom situations in which we worked. Our concern for LD children led us initially to investigate the whys of their failures. Interviews with children successful in fact mastery provided some clues. They revealed that the “successful” child often used easy facts to find answers to harder ones (e.g., 6 + 6 = 12, so 6 + 7 is one more. 13: or 2 × 6 = 12, so 4 × 6 is twice as much, 24). Perhaps what appeared to be a memory problem for an LD child was actually a failure to use relationships to aid his recall of facts. An analysis of the arithmetic texts and of current teaching practices further indicated that many helpful relationships were not emphasized during instruction. The successful student was to discover these for himself.

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