Response to a Specific and Digitally Supported Training at Home for Students With Mathematical Difficulties
Anna Maria Re, Silvia Benavides‐Varela, Martina Pedron, Maria Antonietta De Gennaro, Daniela Lucangeli
Abstract
The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a shortened, specialized and digitally supported training program for enhancing numerical skills in primary and secondary school children with Mathematical Difficulty. The participants (n = 57) were randomly assigned to two groups: for the experimental group the tasks were differentiated and adapted to each student’s learning profile and children of this group used a Web App i.e., “I bambini contano” for the improvement of arithmetic fact at home; for the control group the difficulty of the activities was graded according to the school curriculum, moreover this group did not use the Web App. Pre- to post-training measurements showed that children of the experimental group had an improvement significantly higher than the control group, in particular in arithmetic facts and written calculation. Moreover, a follow-up evaluation indicated that the efficacy of the experimental training program lasted up to two months after the intervention. The results indicate that a specialized face-to-face intervention along with a digitally supported training at home can benefit children with mathematical learning difficulties.