The Concrete-Representational-Abstract Approach for Students With Learning Disabilities: An Evidence-Based Practice Synthesis

As researchers and practitioners have increasingly become interested in what practices are evidence based and for whom in education, different sets of quality indicators and evidence-based practice standards have emerged in the field of special education. Practices are commonly suggested as evidence based, even without a best evidence synthesis on the existing research, such as the case with the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) instructional framework to support students with disabilities in mathematics. This study sought to support the classification of the CRA instructional framework as an evidence-based approach for students with learning disabilities by applying quality indicators and standards of evidence-based practice by Cook et al. (2014). Based on the application of the indicators and standards, the CRA instructional framework was determined to be an evidence-based practice for students with learning disabilities who struggle in mathematics relative to computational problems, such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication, largely with regrouping.