Textbook Presentations of the Basic Addition Facts

Widely usedmathematics textbooks from kindergarten, first, second, and third grades were evaluated both for the frequency and the order of presentation of the basic 100 addition facts 0 + 0 through 9 + 9. A striking result was that the frequency of occurrence distributions for the basic facts were markedly skewed. There were many fewer presentations of large than small problems in the texts, and problems involving the addition of 0 were relatively infrequent at all grades; such was also the case in a similar study conducted in 1924. Correlations among the tabulated variables and a variety of published normative and performance measures are presented. We suggest several possible relationships between these results and the empirical literature on mental arithmetic performance. In particular, reaction time performance across the entire developmental span is closely related to both the frequency of presentation and the order of presentation of the basic facts in elementary texts. Furthermore, both the frequency and order of presentation variables have strong and possibly important relationships to adults' ratings of problem difficulty.