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Evaluating and Comparing Responsiveness to Two Interventions Designed to Enhance Math-Fact Fluency

Erin Carroll, Christopher H. Skinner, and Haley Turner
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Elizabeth McCallum
Duquesne University

Sarah Woodland
Knox County Schools

Abstract: Response-to-intervention models of service delivery are designed to identify, prevent, and remedy students’ academic skill deficits, including mathematics skills deficits. Although educators have developed procedures for enhancing math skills, further research is needed to establish interventions that are both efficient and effective for students functioning at a range of abilities. Researchers used an adapted alternating treatments design to evaluate and compare responsiveness to two interventions intended to improve the addition—fact fluency of a student with mild mental retardation. During cover, copy, compare (CCC), a student was instructed to read a list of math problems and answers, cover each problem and answer, write the problem and answer, and check her response. During the taped-problems intervention (TP), the student received a packet of problems and was instructed to complete each problem before the answer was provided by a corresponding audiotape. A third set of problems served as a control set. To allow for precise comparison of learning rates across interventions, 7.5 minutes were allotted for each intervention. Results showed that both interventions affected increases in addition fluency, with TP yielding more rapid increases. Discussion focuses on the need to provide practitioners with empirically validated interventions as well as the need to compare interventions using precise measures of learning rates in order to identify more effective and efficient interventions.

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