Designing a Multiple Option Arithmetic Curriculum for the Mentally Handicapped: An Interview with John Cawley

A new and comprehensive arithmetic curriculum for mentally handicapped students is under development by Dr. John Cawley at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Now in its third year the project “A Program Project Research and Demonstration Effort in Arithmetic Among the Mentally Handicapped” has been funded for a five year period by the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped. Working with Dr. Cawley on the project are Dr. Vincent Glennon, Dr. Henry A. Goodstein, and graduate assistants from the special education department of the university.

Tailored to the needs of mentally handicapped students, the curriculum is uniquely different from traditional arithmetic programs. Nearly 11,000 units of instruction provide the teacher and student with sufficient material to overcome the fixed frequency problem of other arithmetic programs. In a fixed frequency curriculum, there is a fixed number of pages or problems in each topic area, not allowing for individual learning differences. The multiple option curriculum provides a massive number of lessons in each topic area from which the teacher can select activities providing for full mastery through sufficient experiences in original learning, overlearning, recall, and application.

In sharp contrast to programs which focus on computational activities, Dr. Cawley's program is built upon cognitive or thinking activities designed to develop concepts and principles. Problem solving activities utilize verbal information requiring thought rather than automatic computation. Also built into the program are group activities which teach social responsibility as well as arithmetic concepts.

Various components of the instructional materials can be controlled to meet the learning needs of each child. For example, in verbal problem solving, complexity of three components-vocabulary, sentence length and structure, and arithmetic content-can be varied independently of each other. By increasing the complexity of one component, while holding the other two constant, the teacher is able to diagnose difficulties in learning. More traditional programs increase the complexity of syntactical, semantic, and arithmetical components simultaneously.

In the following interview, Dr. John Cawley talks about the unique nature of his curriculum, innovative teaching techniques, and some newly developed instructional materials.