Adding It Up: Comparing Concrete and App

Manipulatives are a common tool in mathematics teaching and learning, including for students with disabilities. The most common manipulatives are concrete manipulatives, yet app-based manipulatives are a viable age-appropriate option for secondary students with disabilities. Through an adapted alternating treatment design with three middle school students—two with mild intellectual disability and one with a learning disability, researchers explored the impact of virtual and concrete manipulatives on students’ accuracy, independence, and task completion time for solving addition of fractions with unlike denominators. Students were equally successful in terms of accuracy and differences with independence were minimal. When comparing the two manipulative types, the results were idiosyncratic; two students were more independent with the concrete manipulative and one with the app-based manipulative. Implications for research regarding mathematics instruction and use of concrete and app-based manipulatives are discussed