The Effectiveness of Learning Strategies and Attribution Retraining Instruction Methods on Mathematical Problem Solving in Intellectually Disabled Students

the purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of learning strategies and attribution retraining instructions methods on the mathematical problem-solving in male students with intellectual disability. Forty five students in grade eight were selected from intellectually disabled schools of Tehran Province using cluster random sampling method. The Participants were assigned equally to three groups (two experimental groups and one control group). The research design was pretest-posttest control group. One of the experimental groups received eight sessions (45 minutes a session) of learning strategies (Bashavard, 2000) and the other attribution retraining (Golparvar, 2009). To assess the mathematical problem solving performances and the intelligence quotients, a teacher-made Mathematical Problem-Solving Test and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale Wechsler, 1986) were used, respectively. Data were analyzed by analysis of covariance and Tukey test. Results indicated that there were significant differences between the mean of mathematical performance of two experimental groups, and between attribution retraining and control groups. It can be concluded that learning strategies method improved students’ performance in mathematical problemsolving more in comparison to attribution retraining method.