Research Report: Manipulative Materials and Achievement

From an analysis of sixty-four research studies at the elementary school level, Parham (1983) reported a decided difference in the achievement scores of students who had used manipulative materials and those who had not. Those who used manipulative materials scored at approximately the eighty-fifth percentile; those not using manipulative materials scored at the fiftieth percentile. This finding is clearly in agreement with an earlier review by Suydam and Higgins (1977), a major finding of which was that lessons using manipulative materials have a higher probability of producing greater mathematics achievement than do lessons in which such materials are not used.