Abstract

The importance of this study lies in presenting a program to enable the students with mild intellectual disability to acquire some pre-academic mathematical concepts. It also provides a scale to measure the pre-academic mathematical concepts among the educable students with intellectual disability. The study applied the experimental method on a sample of 20 children with intellectual disability who were distributed into two groups; control and experimental. The sample was selected from Rafha Province schools. The program was made up of 96 sessions, four sessions a week. Each session lasted for 60 minutes and was divided into two 30-minute sessions (activities). The researcher used a pre-academic mathematical concepts scale to collect data and to compare the performance of the experimental and control groups in the pre and post-tests. The results of the study indicated that there are statistically significant differences in the pre-academic mathematical concepts scale among the students of the two groups at the (0.01) level in favor of the experimental group.

The improvement in the acquisition of some pre-academic mathematical concepts among the sample members is attributed to the student’s utilization of the program used in the current study, which is based on the guided discovery method. The researcher used a group of attractive activities desired by children. The researcher applied number of immediate reinforcements and constant encouragements to enhance proper functioning. He took into consideration presenting these activities in a gradual simplified way, moving from the easy to the hard.

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