Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background and Objective: Learning disruption is significantly related to academic achievement or daily activities that require reading, math, or writing skills, and therefore, help to people with learning disabilities and ways to overcome it has been very much considered. Disorders of math learning (dyscalculia) is one of the major learning disorders that its rate in school age children report-ed at around 1%. In Iran, the prevalence of dyscalculia has been reported as 8.18%based on meta-analysis results of four studies. The Misha and Kusha educational software is one of the educational software offered by the market, which its manufacturers claim, due to its specific characteristics, can be effective in reducing learning disorders, including mathematics, and has been approved by authorities. Now, the study question is whether the educational software Misha and Kusha, as claimed, has been able to reduce the math disorders of third year elementary students who have math disorders in Hamedan learning centers for treating learning disor-ders. Therefore, the objective of this study was to study the effect of the multimedia educational method of Misha and Kusha in reducing the learning disability in students with math learning disorder.
Methods: In this study, a quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest design with control group was used. The statistical popula-tion of the study consisted of all students with secondary school-based math disorders in Hamadan city (west of Iran) who were in educational centers for treatment of learning disorders, and their number was 100 students (60 girls and 40 boys) according to the general department of education. In this study, by using stratified sampling method, 30 students were replaced in two groups of 15, including 9 girls and 6 boys. After performing pre-test (Iran KMAT standard test) for both groups and ensuring no significant dif-ference between the groups were selected as the experimental group and the other as control. Misha and Kusha educational pro-grams trained students of the experimental group during 12 sessions of 45 minutes. After the end of the training period, simultane-ous post-test was performed for both groups. Descriptive statistics including frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and statistical tests of covariance were used to analyze the data.
Results: Results of multivariate covariance analysis indicated that the observed difference between the mean of the two groups was significant in all subjects taught including counting, addition, subtraction and multiplication at the level (p≤0.05). Therefore, it can be said that education with the Misha and Kusha educational software was effective in reducing math learning disorder. The mean of post-test in experimental group in the counting of the numbers was 0.40 versus 1.40 in the control group, the mean of addition numbers in experimental group was 0.67 versus 1.97 in the Multiplication of numbers, in the subtraction of the numbers of the experimental group was 0.77 versus 2.73 in the control group and in the mean of multiplication of numbers in the experimental group was 1.20 versus 1.32 in the control group. In other words, in all cases, math-learning disorder has decreased more than the control group in the experimental group.
Conclusion: Educational interventions based on multimedia and educational software have been effective on reducing students' mathematical learning disruption. Therefore, it is possible to teach these students to use of this multimedia suggested as an effective way to reduce math-learning disorder.