Abstract
Third and fourth grade students (n = 557) in two comparable schools used different software formats for computer assisted instruction to determine if either format significantly impacted their academic achievement in mathematics and reading. Students, accompanied by their teachers, participated in a laboratory setting for two thirty minutes sessions per week for one and one half years. School A students used software purchased from a publisher and resequenced to align the software lessons with the scope and sequence of the mathematics and reading textbooks in use at the schools. Students at School B used the original software as purchased from the publisher.After all students took the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) and the Basic Skills Inventory (BSI) as pretests and posttests, gain scores were calculated and tested for statistical significance at the .05 level. Means and standard deviations were calculated by gender, content area and software format. These comparisons were analyzed with analysis of variance (ANOVA) using a 2 x 2 factorial design.Findings indicated that students who used the resequenced software achieved significantly higher gain scores on mathematics applications and computations and in total reading. Students using either software did not achieve significantly higher gain scores on mathematics concepts, total mathematics, reading comprehension, and reading vocabulary. Furthermore, there was no significant interaction for gender on either software format in any of the reading and mathematics measures.