In an earlier post I commented on the differences between a spiraled curricular approach and a mastery based one. Is is better for students to work toward mastery of one topic before moving on to the next, or it is better to touch on a broad range of topics briefly every year?The idea of whether students need to be fluent in basic multiplication facts in a similarly debated topic in mathematics education. Some people argue that students must be fluent in multiplication facts by the 3rd possibly 4th grade at the latest in order to successfully move onto higher mathematics concepts successfully. Remember the timed tests? Remember Rocket Math? Remember earning a reward every time you mastered a fact family? Flash cards? This practice and philosophy have very much been the best practice for years. Others argue that teaching students a set of strategies to help them quickly compute multiplication facts is more powerful than just pure memorization, and in essence is a different type of fluency.
Research does show that in order to free up cognitive load and allow students to progress in more difficult mathematics concepts they need to have a firm foundation in basic computation. When students struggle with basic fact fluency their success rate when working with multi-digit multiplication using the standard algorithm is not good. Below are some articles that discuss the importance of computational fluency, specifically multiplication fact fluency in successful mathematics education.
Developing Multiplication Fact Fluency - Brendaful, J. L.
Innovations and Perspective Blog - Virginia Department of Education
Automaticity of Basic Math Facts: The Key to Math Success?
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics - Fluency: Simply Fast and Accurate?
Math Fluency
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