The Comparative Effectiveness of Microcomputers and Flash Cards in the Drill and Practice of Basic Mathematics Facts.

A flash card procedure was designed with some of the features of microcomputers for the drill and practice of basic facts. Second, third, and fourth graders followed the same daily routine for 6 weeks in either a flash card or a microcomputer condition, practicing basic facts in subtraction or division. Weekly tests revealed learning in the first 2 weeks, little or no learning in the third and fourth weeks, and some learning in the fifth week, when the groups changed practice conditions. The flash card and microcomputer conditions produced equivalent learning. Elementary schools have been acquiring microcomputers for instruction at an increasingly rapid rate, and various individuals and companies have been producing software for educational uses of the microcomputer. One of the main categories of such software is that intended to provide drill and practice in mathematics. This drill-and-practice category contains both programs that provide practice on multistep procedures such as computational algorithms or the solution of equations and programs that provide practice in retrieving mathematical information or facts. Although the former types of programs take fuller advantage of the processing capacity of microcomputers, the latter types are much more widely available for both the school and the home market. Microcomputers possess several capabilities that are advantageous for drill programs of both types: They are capable of rapid feedback and correction of errors, they can keep track of the number of errors made and of response speed, they can maintain in memory files of practice materials that are individualized for the needs of particular students, and they can change and update new practice items based on the student's performance. Traditional methods of drill of basic fact retrieval such as flash cards possess this first capability but ordinarily not the other capabilities. However, they are very inexpensive and transportable, and individual sets can be used by a whole classroom simultaneously. Therefore it seemed worthwhile to see if a method