Repetition or novelty

Traditional pedagogy says that most students need to practice a skill many times to master it. With raw computation this seems to make some sense.

In looking over materials about story/ word problems, it seems that that policy is followed as well.

However, there seems to be a glitch in that students often realize... oh this is an addtion problem and so add the numbers. They get into the habit of combining numbers without thinking about how the numbers relate to each other.

Even within a category type of problem it may be necessary to introduce some novelty to insure that the problem is read as a story and not as a series of numbers. Introducing irrelevent number facts and numerical terms that are not part of a computation (the 2nd boy, grade 8) is one way to maintain alertness but for some of my students, recognizing this fact is difficult.

Some students seem to need many opportunities to talk aloud about what they are doing and why,

To think about..... what is the story telling me? What is going on? What is important?

Do students with ADD who by definition have trouble organizing and prioritizing have greater difficulty filtering the relevant facts from the story?