Austin Scholar #137: Why math fact fluency is so powerful
& how math fact fluency helped me excel in K-12
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: How math fact fluency helped me excel in K-12
Why math fact fluency is so powerful
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
Last weekend I went home!! One of my best friends (who goes to Vanderbilt!!) had fall break and was in Austin, so I decided to visit as well. I had so much fun eating good barbeque, watching three football games in one day, completing an entire puzzle in two hours, listening to my sister talk about her new boyfriend, and procrastinating all of my school work. Despite all the distractions, I feel like going home was the reset I needed to get my head back in the game after being sick. It reminded me of how lucky I am to be at Stanford and that there will always be people at home who care about me and are willing to help me.
Austin’s Anecdote: How math fact fluency helped me excel in K-12
Let’s start this off with a definition so we’re all on the same page.
According to the Google AI, “Math fact fluency means the ability to quickly and automatically recall basic math facts, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, without needing to consciously think about the answer, essentially achieving "automaticity" where students can retrieve these facts from memory effortlessly and accurately; it's considered a foundational skill for further mathematical development.”
Everyone knows about fluency in language – fluency in math is the same thing (understanding the ideas so clearly you don't have to think about them in order to use them, just like you don't have to consciously think about the words you're using to make sentences).
My journey with math fact fluency began in third grade, when this one boy in my math class and I raced each other to see who could finish their multiplication worksheet first. At that point in my education journey, it was critical that I could recall every multiplication fact from 1-12 extremely fast. Thus, my multiplication skills got pretty good.
At the same time, my dad had my sister and I doing ten minutes of Quick Math per day to try and beat his score in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
This consistent practice helped me become fluent in these basic functions.
After I’d beaten that boy a sufficient number of times and finally topped my dad’s score by one second, I put the idea of memorizing more math facts out of my head.
Yet math, of course, builds on itself. So being able to automatically know what 7x8 is or what 172-63 is helped me move more quickly through algebra and geometry and algebra two and pre-calculus.
Turns out, my mission to beat that boy in third grade paid off for years.
But once I got to Calculus, I realized there was a whole new set of math facts I had to become fluent in: derivatives and integrals.
If I get a complicated improper integral problem, I can’t spend all of my time trying to figure out what the integral of 1/x^2 is. If I want to keep moving (especially on something like a timed test), I need to know that part of the answer automatically.
So instead of working on those more complicated problems, I spent my time memorizing those derivative and integral rules. Then, once I was fluent in those facts, I turned back to the improper integrals and found myself able to complete them so much faster.
Understanding with automaticity the basic facts in a math class has allowed me to learn in 2 hours per day.
Why math fact fluency is so powerful
According to a literature review of math fact fluency, “[w]hen automaticity is achieved at the desired developmental stage in a child’s life, they are more likely to have continued success in mathematics.”
Why is this true?
Well, think about it this way: