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The Taped Problems Intervention:  Increasing Multiplication Fact Fluency

Using a Low-Tech Time Delay Intervention

Elizabeth McCallum, Christopher Skinner, Haley Turner, Lee Saecker,

University of Tennessee

            With the advancement of response-to-intervention (RTI) models of service delivery, school psychologists have renewed their focus on developing and implementing evidenced-based interventions in order to prevent and remedy academic skill deficits. Students who do not respond to evidence-based interventions can be identified early and more intense and student-specific assessment and intervention procedures can be used to enhance their skill development and learning. At all levels of service delivery, the success of current RTI models of service delivery requires practical, effective, and efficient research-based interventions.

Elementary school teachers commonly report that students are not quick (i.e., automatic, fluent) with their basic math facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and that this impedes the teaching of more advanced math skills.  In this study, we used a multiple-baseline across tasks design to empirically validate the taped-math intervention, a class-wide procedure designed to enhance math fact fluency.

This taped-math intervention was conducted with a general education third-grade class of 18 racially and intellectually diverse students.  The intervention included a series of tapes with multiplication facts and their answers spoken with varying delays between the problems and their answers.  The students were given follow-along sheets and told to try to “beat the tape” by writing the answers before they heard them on the tape.  Although researchers implemented the intervention, the taped math intervention is designed to be easily administered by teachers or students themselves. 

Each day, a tape of multiplication problems and answers was played.  Each tape consisted of a series of 12 problems repeated four times. The first time through, the problems were spoken with no delay between each problem and its answer.   The next time they were read, the problems had 4 second delays before their answers were read.  The final 2 repetitions included 2 second delays.  The initial no-delay series was used to discourage students from using time-consuming finger counting procedures.  The long (4 second) delay was used to give the students some time to come up with the answers on their own.  The delays were then decreased (2 second) to promote rapid or fluent responding. 

We assessed the students’ progress with a series of 1 minute tests that included the same problems from the tape.  The results were analyzed and graphed.  They showed that the majority of students (13 of 18) dramatically improved their multiplication fact fluency (rapid and accurate responding) following the implementation of the intervention.  Additionally, most students maintained their increased performance. Finally, most students reported liking the intervention and thinking that their friends would like learning math facts this way too. 

The taped math intervention provides a simple, low-tech, time and resource efficient procedure for getting students to become more automatic on their math facts.  It can be administered class-wide by teachers or self-administered at individual learning centers by students themselves.  The intervention and group assessment procedures may also be used to identify students who are not making progress (e.g., failing to respond to the intervention) so that other procedure can be applied to enhance their skill development.

Resources

            In addition to the current study, we have conducted several other studies of the taped-problems procedure. One is publish and the other two should appear shortly. Furthermore, we have another article that will appear shortly in School Psychology Review which describes a study using similar procedure to enhance sight-word reading of an English Language Learner.

Other Taped-Problems Intervention Studies

McCallum, E., Skinner, C. H., & Hutchins, H. (2004). The taped-problems intervention:           Increasing division fact fluency using a low-tech self-managed time-delay          intervention. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 20(2), 129-147.

Poncy, B. C., Skinner, C. H., & Jaspers, K. E. (in press). Evaluating and comparing     interventions designed to enhance math fact accuracy and fluency: Cover, copy,    and compare versus taped problems. Journal of Behavioral Education.

Carroll, E., Skinner, C. H., Turner, H., McCallum, E., & Masters, S. (in press).            Evaluating and comparing responsiveness to two interventions designed to             enhance math-fact fluency. School Psychology Forum: Research in Practice.

Similar Procedure (Tape-Words) Used to Enhance Sight-word Reading

Bliss, S., Skinner, C. H., & Adams, R. (in press). Enhancing sight-word reading with a time delay taped-words intervention with an English language learning fifth-grade       student. School Psychology Review.