Summary of SyMETRI meeting April 25th, 2023 by Qiaochu Xu

Presenter/Guest Speaker: Charli-Rae Dougherty from the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, UBC
Date: April 25th, 2023
Host: Dr. Cynthia Nicol

In the SyMETRI meeting on April 25, 2023,

Charli-Rae Dougherty presented her masters in math education capstone project titled“Learning Disabilities in Mathematics: A Survey of British Columbia Teachers’ Understandings, Perspectives, and Experiences.” Charli-Rae is a practicing teacher in the Quesnel School District in central British Columbia. She surveyed teachers across BC to learn of their experiences and perspectives of students’ learning disabilities in mathematics.

Charlie-Rae began our meeting by introducing some characteristics of learning disabilities in mathematics such as significant difficulty learning mathematics where teaching and remediation strategies are less effective, difficulty working with symbolic representations, poor working memory, and high anxiety around mathematics. Charli-Rae also mentioned that there are relatively few studies that focus on learning disabilities in mathematics, with mostly being case studies or correlational research studies. Charli-Rae investigated the following questions in her capstone project:

• How knowledgeable of MLD do teachers perceive themselves?
• How confident are teachers in meeting the needs of their students with MLD (learning disabilities in math)?
• What characteristics do teachers notice in their students’ with MLD?
• What strategies do teachers use to support with learning disabilities?

Public and private school K-12 teachers in BC were invited to respond to a survey that included likert scales and open-response questions. In total, 223 participants responded. Among them, 42% were elementary classroom teachers, and 26% were mathematics teachers. Interestingly, more than half of the participating teachers rated themselves as not knowledgeable at all about the process and criteria required for the diagnosis of learning disabilities in math. Respondents stated that it is difficult to understand what a learning disability in math is if you are not aware of what it takes to be diagnosed with one.

Here are some results of her study:

Those attending SyMETRI asked questions about the research design of survey methods, such as what questions to ask on the survey to get accurate responses and how to ask questions differently to improve the quality of the survey. SyMETRI members also asked about teaching strategies to teach students with learning disabilities in math, such as over learning, repeated practice, and backtracking. Other members shared their opinions on the use of concrete objects and manipulative to support abstract and spatial thinking skills in the math classroom.