Flashcard is a serious learning tool intended for the mastery of the elementary arithmetic facts. Flashcard provides an excellent foundation for learning higher math. Students who already 'know' the facts learn them much faster and more accurate. Flashcard tracks student progress to make learning efficient and build student confidence.
Other than assistance getting started and occasional encouragement students are expected to run Flashcard on their own. Flashcard downloads to your hard drive and starts easily from your desktop.
The Flashcard screen is kept deliberately simple to promote good concentration. There are not a lot of distracting bells and whistles, or entertainment. Most students learn to answer the questions very rapidly with the numeric keypad at the right of the keyboard.
Flashcard tracks the answer history for each question and predicts how soon each question should be asked again. Tracking makes learning highly efficient. New facts are introduced as started facts are mastered.
New facts are introduced at a snail's pace if the accuracy is below 85% and much faster if accuracy is above 95%. Learned facts continue to be reviewed at a diminishing frequency so the student can concentrate on new facts.
The next run can begin when enough facts are due. Flashcard will not ask for more than 30 to 50 correct answers at a time. We are asking for good concentration but only for a brief time, usually about 3 minutes.
Flashcard can be run once a day but learning is faster if run more often. We recommend morning, afternoon, and evening. It is important that the student remembers a new fact before forgetting it. It is OK to skip a day but newly learned facts may be forgotten.
The student will be invited to begin multiplication and division after demonstrating addition and subtraction proficiency.
Flashcard does not teach the arithmetic concepts, rather it is a tool for learning the life-long skill of rapid, accurate recall of a large number of facts. Experience has shown that learning is faster if the student can add and subtract on their fingers or with other objects. Multiplication and division students should be able for example to divide 12 objects into 3 groups to get 4 or combine 6 groups of 2 to get 12.
Mastering these 473 facts is a significant amount of learning which will not happen in a few days. Remember: a few good minutes at a time a few times a day. Minutes spent mastering the facts early saves hours over the course of a mathematics education.
Many students gain considerable self-confidence and self-esteem from their progress. We have observed that mastering theses facts can lead to an appetite for learning higher math. We also have seen the interest in learning spread to other subjects as well.
Thank you.