This thesis is the report of an experiment carried on under the direction of Harry Huffman, Professor of Business Education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, using material in Programmed Business Mathematics which was written by Dr. Huffman especially for post high school students and college freshmen.

The programmed material used in the experiment consisted of the first 239 frames covering the basic fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The main emphasis of the program is on building speed and accuracy in applying the skills and concepts related to these basic processes.

The subjects of the experiment were eleven high school students from grades 9, 10, and 12, at Eastern Mennonite High School.

The purpose of the experiment was to obtain these data:

1. What kind of errors do high school students make on the program?

2. What changes need to be made in the program to adapt it for use on the high school level?

3. Can the program be adjusted so that high school students can work through it with five percent or less of errors?

The writer found that errors were grouped under these major headings and in this order: Lack of comprehension of concepts introduced, carelessness, and computational (errors of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division).

The frames were revised three times during the experiment. Revision consisted of adding prompts of underlining or new words, rewriting frames, or constructing new frames.

Two students went through the original frames: average errors, 6.56 percent. Three students worked with the first revision: average errors, 11.58 percent. Four students worked with the second revision: average errors, 3.13 percent. Two students worked with the third revision: average errors, 2.56.

Although the error rate did not drop consistently, it did drop from a high of 11.58 percent on the second round of testing to 2.56 percent for the final round, a decrease of 9.02 in percent.

Individual differences in I.Q., previous training, and the manner in which the student-editors worked undoubtedly account for part of the variation in error percentages.

The results of the experiment show that it is possible for high school students to work on the fundamentals of business mathematics frames with an error limit of five percent or less.