CURRICULUM AND OPERATION OF THE LABORATORY

This chapter describes the curriculum and the operation of the laboratory made for the tutorial program in elementary mathematics that was developed and tested at Brentwood Elementary School in East Palo Alto in 1966. The lessons in the mathematics program covered the ordinary range of arithmetic topics, as well as a few topics less commonly found in first and second grades. The content and scope of the curriculum were drawn largely from Suppes with the addition of some topics, such as oral story problems, which cannot by their nature be adapted to a textbook format. As the programmed lessons were tutorial, many of the lessons were explanatory, relying on oral explanations synchronized with changing visual displays. The lessons were short, and explanations were simple and direct. Generally, the problems within one lesson were all of the same type; the first few were accompanied by explanatory audio messages, leaving the remainder as practice problems. Both explanatory and practice problems contained provisional audio messages that were heard only by the students who responded incorrectly or who failed to respond within a reasonable time.