Instruction on Concrete Operations for Children who are Mildly Mentally Retarded

Abstract

A curriculum innovation was attempted in special education classrooms serving 6- to 9-yr-old children who were mildly mentally retarded. Children in the control group followed individualized programs of instruction, with emphasis on verbal and number concepts. For children in the experimental group, teachers substituted lessons on Piagetian operations with large sets of manipulatives for varying parts of these individualized programs of studies. Children in both groups made significant gains on most measures over the course of a year. The children receiving instruction on the Piagetian operations usually gained more, and the differences in amount of change from pretest to posttest were statistically significant for a seriation test and the Peabody Individual Achievement Test. Both groups gained in an absolute sense, and the PIAT percentile measure showed that the children receiving the experimental instruction nearly held their own when compared to children with no handicapping condition. The other children lost four percentile points, because their absolute gain did not match their gain in age. These results are evidence that investment of classroom time in instruction in the basic cognitive operations of classification and seriation via sets of widely varying manipulatives is relatively profitable.