Strategy Summaries

Recommendations from the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide:

Cross-Content

  • Summary of Recommendation 1: Build on students’ informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial fraction concepts.
  • Summary of Recommendation 2: Help students recognize that fractions are numbers and that they expand the number system beyond whole numbers. Use number lines as a central representational tool in teaching this and other fraction concepts from the early grades onward.
  • Summary of Recommendation 3: Help students understand why procedures for computations with fractions make sense.
  • Summary of Recommendation 4: Develop students’ conceptual understanding of strategies for solving ratio, rate, and proportion problems before exposing them to cross-multiplication as a procedure to use to solve such problems.
  • Summary of Recommendation 4: Interventions should include instruction on solving word problems that are based on common underlying structures.
  • Summary of Recommendation 5: Intervention materials should include opportunities for students to work with visual representations of mathematical ideas and interventionists should be proficient in the use of visual representations of mathematical ideas.
  • Summary of Recommendation 6: Interventions at all grade levels should devote about 10 minutes in each session to building fluent retrieval of basic arithmetic facts.