Exploring the Effects of Conversational Repair as a Scaffolding Strategy to Promote Mathematics Explanations of Students with Learning Disabilities

<p>Conversational repair often occurs in conversations when people attempt to address communicative breakdowns or inaccuracy by way of repeating what have been said or putting them in another way. The review of literature on conversational repair revealed that as an important concept in pragmatic aspect of language, it is an effective strategy to improve communication of different populations with disabilities. However, it is rarely studied in the domain of mathematics and with the population with learning disabilities/difficulties (LD). In current reform-based, discourse-oriented mathematics classrooms, students with LD encounter difficulties articulating or explaining well their reasoning processes due to the mathematical and communicative difficulties they may have. As such, the ability to repair communicative breakdowns or inaccuracy - making conversational repair - is important for them to make progress in classroom discourse and team work.</p> <p>This study designed the intervention based on the different repair request techniques in the implicit-explicit continuum to elicit repair of self-explanation from students with LD. Using a multiple-baseline-across-participants design, the study found that the intervention was effective for improving the students' problem solving and reasoning ability measured by their word-problem-solving performance and self-explanation performance, respectively. It provided implications for future studies concerning the use of conversational repair in subject domain classroom discourse, especially for individuals with LD.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Studies

Year

2013

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Jia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Yan Ping Xin
• Sydney Zentall
• David Sears
• Jeffrey Gilger

• conversational repair
• learning disabilities
• mathematics reasoning
• scaffolding
• self-explanation
• word problem
• education
• Mathematics
• Special Education and Teaching

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/108

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-1107