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Abstract

This article deals with classroom application of cognitive psychology. It reviews briefly some of the research related to the development of automaticity for recall of basic math facts, reports on a single-subject research project, and gives teaching suggestions for the development of automaticity. The research project reports on six students in fourth and fifth grade who were presented addition problems on a computer for 5 minutes daily over a period of at least 27 days. Using an ABAB design, all students were exposed to large and small sets of problems. Student response time, measured as initial keystroke latency on the computer, decreased dramatically as did time needed to complete written posttests. An analysis of the effects of practice set size revealed no differences when practice sets contained only 3 new problems out of 10 on a large problem set of 20 problems.

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References

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Practicing Math Facts on the Computer

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