Access and Sense Making: Instructional Practices to Support Engagement with Grade-Level Mathematics for Students with Disabilities

Educators are often unsure how to support students with disabilities in grade-level mathematics, and special education intervention often focuses exclusively on computational fluency. In this case study, we explore how one third-grade student with learning disabilities successfully engaged in grade-level mathematics problem solving across 45 video-recorded one-on-one instructional sessions. Although she experienced difficulty with foundational number skills (e.g., counting, reading and writing numbers), the analysis identified a set of instructional practices that enabled her to meaningfully engage with grade-level problems. By analyzing these practices through the Teaching for Robust Understanding framework (Schoenfeld et al., 2023), we provide an important counterargument to special education research that claims that students with disabilities require teacher-directed, explicit instruction focused on foundational skills and fluency.