Effectiveness of a cognitive strategy intervention in improving arithmetic computation based on the PASS theory

The purpose of this study was to determine if an instruction designed to facilitate planning, given by teachers to their class as a group, would have differential effects depending on the specific Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) cognitive characteristics of each child. A cognitive strategy instruction that encouraged planning was provided to the group of 19 students with learning disabilities and mild mental impairments. All students completed math worksheets during 7 baseline and 14 intervention sessions. During the intervention phase, students engaged in self-reflection and verbalization of strategies about how the arithmetic computation worksheets should be completed. The sample was sorted into one experimental and four contrast groups after the experiment was completed. There were four groups with a cognitive weakness in each PASS scale from the Cognitive Assessment System and one group with no cognitive weakness. The results showed that children with a cognitive weakness in Planning improved considerably (large effect size of 1.4), in contrast to those with a cognitive weakness in Attention (small effect size of 0.3), Simultaneous weakness (a slight deterioration and effect size of -0.2), Successive weakness (medium effect size of 0.4), and no cognitive weakness (small effect size of .2). These data showed that children with a Planning weakness benefitted from the instruction designed to help them be more plaful. Those children who received the planning-based instruction who were not low inplanning did not show the same level of improvement.