Using Magic Board as a Teaching Aid in Third Grader Learning of Area Concepts

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of incorporating Magic Board in the instruction of concepts related to area. We adopted a non-equivalent quasi-experimental design and recruited participants from two classes of third-grade students in an elementary school in Taoyuan County, Taiwan. Magic Board was used as a teaching aid in the experimental group, and physical manipulatives were employed as teaching aids in the control group. Both groups took the Basic Area Concept Test as a pretest, followed by the Area Concept Test to evaluate retention two weeks later. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of Magic Board over that of physical manipulatives on three subscales of immediate learning performance and all four subscales of retention performance. We also discuss the implications of these results and provide recommendations for future research.