Use of Skin-Shock at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC)

 

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The Use of Curriculum Steps to Teach Math Facts
 

Edward Langford, Angela Galvin, Matthew L. Israel, Michelle I. Harrington and Robert W. Worsham
 

Judge Rotenberg Educational Center
240 Turnpike St.
Canton, MA 02021
(781) 828-2202

 

Based on a poster presented at Association for Behavior Analysis Conference, May 2005, Chicago, IL

 

1)      Introduction

 The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (www.judgerc.org) operates day and residential programs for children and adults with behavior problems, including conduct disorders, emotional problems, brain injury or psychosis, autism, and developmental disabilities.  The fundamental approach taken at JRC is the use of behavioral psychology and its various technological applications, including behavioral education, programmed instruction, precision teaching, behavior modification, behavior therapy, behavioral counseling, self-management of behavior, and chart-sharing. 

JRC employs the tenets of Precision Teaching (Potts, Eshleman & Cooper, 1993), which include fluency and “overlearning” (Binder, 1987). An important aspect of Precision Teaching is the automaticity that results.  This study reports the effects of Precision Teaching in learning basic math facts.  The participant in this study used a computer program to learn basic math facts at a rate of up to 40 problems correct per minute. 

2) Method

The participant was a 15 year old female, who has a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder and a Full Scale IQ of 83.  She lives in one of JRC’s group homes and attends school at JRC's main school building.  This participant was chosen because she had never worked on JRCs Math Facts program prior to this study.   

JRC’s Math Facts Program is made up of four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  Each operation consists of 19 lessons.  The Math Facts computer program breaks down basic math facts into many different curriculum steps and utilizes the See/Type learning channel.  Students are presented with problems on their computer screen and have to type in the correct answer.  The participant must master a curriculum step at a pre-determined rate correct before moving on to the next curriculum step.  

Each subtraction step presents more new facts than the step before.  A subtraction step can be comprised of a lesson introducing new facts and a lesson reviewing previously learned facts.  For example, Subtraction Lesson 4 presents seven new facts 3-0, 4-1, 5-2, 6-3, 3-3, 4-3, 5-3; whereas Subtraction Lesson14 presents 17 new facts.  The last curriculum step is a cumulative review of all facts.

In the beginning of the study, the participant was pre-tested on the last curriculum steps of Subtraction and Division (S18, S19 and D18), which presents all of the basic math facts learned in the entire curriculum.

The computer program was configured to one-minute timings.  The computer was also configured in test mode which provided immediate feedback to the student as to whether the problem was correct or incorrect.  If the student gave a correct answer, she received a check.  If she gave an incorrect answer, she received an “x” and the correct answer.  The participant did not receive any visual prompts when answering the questions. 

The participant received computer instruction, but did not receive any teacher instruction throughout the entire study.  She was only told what lesson to work on for the day.  She was not required to complete a set number of timings per day.

The participant was required to work on subtraction problems found in Subtraction Lessons 1 through 19 of the program and division problems found in Division Lesson 18 of the program.  She was non-complaint to complete any timings on 8 occasions throughout the study.

The JRC Math Facts curriculum is modeled after the principles of Precision Teaching.   For the subtraction facts, material was presented in small curriculum steps.  Once the student achieved at least 40 correct responses and 0 errors per minute, she moved to the next curriculum step.  The division facts were not broken into small steps, but rather presented all at once.   All data were plotted on the Standard Celeration Chart (Lindsley, 1992, p. 51). 

3)      Results

The successive timings data for Subtraction Lessons 1 through 19 is displayed in Figure 1 on a Standard Celeration Chart.

Successive timings data for Division Lesson 18 is displayed in Figure 2 on a Standard Celeration Chart.

Pre-test and post-test data for Subtraction Lesson 18 and 19 and Division Lesson 18 is displayed in Figure 3 on a Standard Celeration Chart.

The participant received four hours and four minutes of instruction time on Subtraction lessons 1 through 19, completing 244 one-minute timings and passing through 19 curriculum steps.  She also received two hours and five minutes of instruction time on Division Lesson 18, completing 125 one-minute timings without passing the lesson.

4) Discussion

Through the use of Precision Teaching, the participant was able to make significant progress towards increasing her academic performance.   The data shows that this particular student learned the subtraction facts more quickly when the curriculum was broken into smaller steps, but could not learn division facts when all items were presented without curriculum steps.  Based on this data, it can be assumed that she could master the entire Math Facts program in 16 hours of instruction.  Further study should be done to potentially test the effect of providing instruction in smaller steps rather than presenting all facts at once.