THE RELATIONSHIP OF PRECISION TEACHING TO THE SPEED, COMPUTATIONAL SKILL DEVELOPMENT, AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT OF WORKING WITH RATIONAL NUMBER

This study investigated the relationship of precision teaching as an evaluative procedure to the achievement of rational numbers in a grade five mathematics class. The areas of speed, computational skill development, and concept development of working with rational numbers were studied.;Precision teaching, an extension of the task analysis model of diagnostic/prescripitve teaching, focuses on diagnosis of learner errors and appropriate curriculum changes. It involves the development of a set of procedures which is used to measure the student's knowledge of a certain subject area.;A non-equivalent control group design was used. Student performance was measured with three different research-constructed tests. The computational skill test was used as a pre-treatment and post-treatment achievement test. Speed in working with rational numbers was evaluated by a timed-test of computational problems. The area of concept development was a testing process which required the identification of a rational number and the naming of the concept.;The sample consisted of 310 grade five students from two different school districts with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. One entire school district was selected as the experimental group, while the other district was chosen as the control group.;The statistical analyses focused on a multiple analysis of variance test (MANOVA) with nested designs and a Scheffe test of multiple comparisons. Analyses of the data revealed that the experimental and control groups differed significantly at the .05 level of significance in their mean scores on the tests of speed, computational skill development, and concept development in favor of the experimental group. The Scheffe test showed that some of the lower achieving classes of the control group differed significantly from some of the higher achieving classes of the experimental group.;In summary, this research shows that a group using the precision teaching technique achieved better than a group that did not use one. A group that used brief systematic practice during the unit of rational numbers had higher performance on all three researcher-constructed evaluations. Moreover, when such intensive practice was accompanied with classroom activities and explanations, greater scores on speed, computational skill development, and concept development of rational numbers was found.