Successful Intervention for Students with Learning Difficulties in the Middle School Years: The QuickSmart Approach

This paper explores issues about effectively supporting students with learning difficulties in the middle school years in the context of Australian schools. It begins by defining learning difficulties (LD) and attempting to identify the 'obstacles to learning' encountered by middle years students who experience difficulties in academic learning. The impact of LD on student learning in literacy and numeracy and the flow-on effect on content area learning, is then briefly explored. The second section of the paper examines research on effective in-class teaching and learning and briefly reports some practices used to accommodate LD students in the classroom, before going on to argue that these in-class practices need to be augmented by specific, research-based interventions to better enable students to overcome barriers to making progress with basic academic skills. In the final section one such research-based intervention, QuickSmart, which incorporates the Computer-assisted Academic Assessment System (CAAS), is briefly reported. The promising results from the first implementation of the intervention have been validated by follow-up studies and current projects are continuing to explore the implementation and efficacy of the QuickSmart intervention. Results to date indicate the positive effect of improved automaticity of basic academic skills on students' higher-order processes, such as problem solving and comprehension.