Our past research identified two aspects of deaf children’s functioning that places them at risk for underachievement in mathematics. The first is their reduced opportunities for in- cidental learning, and the second is their difficulty in making inferences involving time sequences. This article examines the effectiveness of an intervention program to promote deaf children’s numeracy that was designed to deal with these two factors. The design involved a comparison of 23 deaf pupils participating in the project with a baseline group formed by 65 deaf pupils attending the same schools in the previous year. The project pupils were tested before and after the in- tervention on the NFER-Nelson Age Appropriate Mathe- matics Achievement Test. The intervention was delivered by the teachers during the time normally scheduled for mathe- matics lessons. The project pupils did not differ from the baseline group at pretest but performed significantly better at posttest. They also performed at posttest better than ex- pected on the basis of their pretest scores, according to norms provided by the NFER-Nelson Age Appropriate Mathemat- ics Test for assessing the progress of hearing pupils. We con- clude that the program was effective in promoting deaf pu- pils’ achievement in numeracy. We describe in this article an intervention project de- signed to raise the achievement of deaf pupils in math- ematics. It is well established that deaf pupils lag be- hind hearing pupils in mathematics. The National Council of Teachers of the Deaf (1957) in England car- ried out a study with a large sample of deaf pupils and reported that deaf pupils were on average 2.5 years be- hind in mathematics achievement tests. About a decade later, Wollman (1965) reported similar results in a sur- vey that included a third of the pupils from 13 schools for the deaf in the United Kingdom. Wood, Wood, and Howarth (1983) found that no improvement in this sit- uation could be documented two decades later: in their study deaf pupils were approximately 3.4 years behind in mathematics achievement when compared to their hearing counterparts. In the first section of this article, we argue that it is possible to raise the mathematics achievement of deaf pupils. In the second section, we describe the intervention program we carried out and the results of its assessment. In the last section, we dis- cuss the implications for future research. Is It Possible to Raise the Mathematics Achievement of Deaf Pupils? We (Nunes & Moreno, 1998) have argued that hearing loss cannot be treated as a cause of difficulties in math- ematics but as a risk factor. Several findings in the liter- ature suggest that hearing loss is not a direct cause of difficulties in mathematics. First, not all deaf pupils are weaker in math than their hearing counterparts: ap- proximately 15% of the profoundly deaf pupils per- form at average or above average levels in standardized tests (Wood et al., 1983). If hearing loss were a direct cause of difficulties in mathematics, there should be no We thank The Nuffield Foundation for the support received through grant number HQ/313[EDU] without which this work would not have been possible. We also thank the schools, teachers, and children who en- thusiastically participated in this project. Correspondence should be sent to Terezinha Nunes, Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes Univer- sity, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom (e-mail: tnunes@ brookes.ac.uk).  2002 Oxford University Press An Intervention Program for Promoting Deaf Pupils’ Achievement in Mathematics Terezinha Nunes Oxford Brookes University Constanza Moreno Royal Holloway, University of London