Building Prealgebra Fluency Through a Self-Managed Practice Intervention: Order of Operations

James D Stocker Jr; Richard M Kubina Jr

doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00501-3

Building Prealgebra Fluency Through a Self-Managed Practice Intervention: Order of Operations

Behav Anal Pract. 2021 Feb 16;14(3):608-622. doi: 10.1007/s40617-020-00501-3. eCollection 2021 Sep.

Authors

James D Stocker Jr¹, Richard M Kubina Jr²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Early Childhood, Elementary, Middle, Literacy and Special Education, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, 601 S. College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403 USA.
² Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education, The Pennsylvania State University, 209 CEDAR Building, University Park, PA 16802 USA.

Abstract

Behavioral fluency refers to a combination of accuracy and speed that enables students to function proficiently in the learning environment. The present study investigated the effects of a self-managed frequency-building intervention on the behavioral fluency of a critical prealgebra skill in four 6th-grade students. The intervention involved students having access to the PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction) mnemonic during frequency building. Using an alternating-treatments design, the first experimental condition presented the intervention as three 1-min practice trials with 30 s of feedback delivered immediately after each frequency-building trial ended. The second condition offered one 3-min practice trial with 90 s of feedback once the trial ended. A baseline condition (no practice) had the students engage in a 1-min timed trial with no feedback. The alternating-treatments design demonstrated that three of the four students produced a superior performance within the two intervention conditions when compared to baseline. However, the results did not conclusively show that one frequency-building intervention was superior to the other.

Keywords: behavioral fluency; complex computation; feedback; frequency building; mathematics fluency; pre-algebra fluency; self-managed interventions.