Fadeout or Forgetting? A Brief Booster Lesson to Support the Maintenance of First-Grade Mathematics Intervention Effects

Abstract

The positive effects of mathematics intervention on elementary students' academic ability often fade out during the years following intervention. One theory to explain the fadeout of intervention effects is that once intervention ends students stop accessing the concepts and procedures taught during intervention, and the strategies and knowledge they learned become deactivated. The present study examined the possibility that intervention effects persist following intervention but reside in a deactivated state. We developed a brief booster lesson designed to reactivate student knowledge on one key component of a first-grade intervention, calculation strategies for deriving answers to simple addition and subtraction problems. The booster lesson was administered to 40 third-grade students, 28 of whom received 15 weeks of 1st-grade mathematics intervention and 12 of whom served in that study's control group. A one-way between-groups analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) on post-booster lesson computation scores, controlling for pre-booster lesson computation scores, found no significant difference between conditions. Results suggest that the brief booster lesson did not reactivate marginal knowledge in students who previously received intervention. Implications for future research are discussed.