Abstract

Many students’ feel difficulties in learning mathematical concepts and lag behind in their progress as compared to their fellow learners. Their accommodation with regular peers remains always a challenge for the educators and professionals of the field. Experts of the field consider inclusive education as a multi-cog strategy where children with and without special needs belonging to diverse societal groups and marginalized assemblages participate together in learning activities in the same programs. The main objective of this study was to identify problems faced by slow learners in learning Mathematics and identify effective teaching strategies for teaching mathematics to slow learners in inclusive class room at primary school level. The nature of this study was descriptive based on a self report survey, and the sample of the study was 122 teachers selected randomly from 11 primary inclusive schools in district Lahore. The self-developed instrument was consisted on two components; students’ mathematics problems and teaching strategies. The results of the study revealed that students face difficulty in understanding the concept of ‘place value’ and they remained unable to apply mathematical concepts in daily life for the sake of ‘solving problems’. Short term memory of learners emerged as a major difficulty faced by the educators in teaching mathematics, so they often use short duration work sessions’ strategy with achievable goals and use pictorial cues rarely. Teachers’ experience of teaching to divers learners contributed towards the use of proper teaching strategies. Teachers are expected to keep an eye on slow learners as well as on other students with special needs. Teacher educators are supposed to emphasize on development of pre-service training programs enabling future teachers to face the divers learning challenges especially in the subject of mathematics.