It has a limited number of flashcards, and if a student gets a math fact wrong, the computer adds it back into the pile for the next day’s work. He likes an online computer program he uses with his middle school students who still struggle with math facts.
Many online games purport to help with fact fluency, but as usual, the devil is in the details, and teachers need to know precisely how these programs work, said Kane, the Colorado teacher. As the teacher quizzes the students, the teacher gradually adds more known facts, increasing the time between the known facts and the new one the student is learning. One teaching approach here is called incremental rehearsal: Teachers present a new math-fact flashcard alongside one that a student already knows. “You can’t become fluent with all of them at once.” You have to structure it in the way we know works for retrieval practice-three facts, maybe four, maybe two,” she said. “When you use all the number combinations randomly, that is too much for a kid to remember. Whether students are building their fact fluency with flashcards, worksheets, dice games, or other common tools, there’s a tendency to try to do too much at once, cautions Nicole McNeil, a professor of psychology and the director of lab on cognition, learning, and development at the University of Notre Dame.
Focus on student mastery of a few facts at a time-and space practice out But it doesn’t have to take forever-or be a drag: Keep the practice relatively short but consistent, keep it well-sequenced, and don’t try to do too much at once, they adivsed. In general, they said, math-fact-fluency work can and should be a purposeful part of the math classroom.
We asked them how they approach fact fluency-and how to balance this piece of the math puzzle against all the other things that should happen in the elementary math classroom. Because it’s old and boring for us doesn’t mean it’s old and boring for them.”įor this story, Education Week examined dozens of studies, spoke to researchers on cognition, and interviewed practicing teachers. “But successfully learning new things is motivating for students. “Multiplication facts seem boring to us because we know them,” noted Dylan Kane, a 7th grade math teacher in the Lake County district in Leadville, Colo. In part that is a product of bad practice-like hours on computer programs or poorly crafted timed exercises-but some of it, some teachers note, is also the product of adult baggage.
The real problem is that research doesn’t point to a clear recipe for how to help students develop their math facts.Īdding to the challenge, some teachers labor under the idea that explicit work on fact fluency isn’t fun for kids, is stressful, or ignores deeper conceptual math.
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