The Three Components of Fluency

Fluency is currently a hot topic in education. Regardless of whether you’re engaged in literacy or math education communities, you’ll have heard the term come up. In today’s blog post, we’re going to talk about the three components of Basic Math Fact Fluency: flexibility, efficiency and accuracy.

Setting a Common Definition

Before we dive into each of the components, let’s take a moment to define the term fluency and consider how we’ll be using it here.

When I think about fluency, my brain associates it with language — I think of being fluent in Spanish or another language. Those who are fluent in a language can quickly produce, understand and think in that language. Moreover, fluent speakers of a language can utilize localized dialects to support their understanding and interactions within the language.

When we consider basic math fact fluency, we want students to be able to do the same: use numbers flexibly within different contexts while quickly and accurately recalling basic math facts. A fluent mathematician would be able to produce a correct response in less than three seconds.

Let’s dive a little deeper.

Accuracy

Simply put, is an answer correct? Accuracy is the easiest component to assess. When we dive into this topic in future blog posts, we’ll talk about how we can help students identify their own accuracy errors.

Efficiency

Efficiency is a student’s ability to correctly identify a strategy that allows them to respond to a basic math fact and produce the answer within three to five seconds.

Flexibility

Flexibility refers to the ability to apply patterns within numbers to support facts that aren’t yet known from memory. For example, if a student can’t recall that 5 + 4 = 9, they could use the double fact 4 + 4 = 8 and then add 1 to get the answer. As students practice, flexibility helps them automatically produce an accurate answer.

All three components of fluency are important and require different means of assessment and support to help students work toward automaticity. This needs to be done “using number relationships and reasoning strategies, not memorization. Students who learn fact strategies outperform students who learn through other approaches”.

The next few blog posts will cover various topics related to fluency. We’ll explore how to leverage the approaches of number relationships and reasoning strategies to help students become fluent in basic math facts.

I’d love to hear from you and find out how you’re seeing, hearing about or approaching fluency in your classroom. You can email me at ndupre@mtholyoke.edu. I can’t wait to hear from you!