Children who engage in a lot of practice without understanding what they are doing often forget, or remember incorrectly, those procedures. Children need to be both procedurally and conceptually fluent - they need to know both how and why. The phrase 'number sense' is often used to mean conceptual fluency - understanding place value and the relationships between operations. To the person without number sense, arithmetic is a bewildering territory in which any deviation from the known path may rapidly lead to being totally lost. So fluency demands more of students than memorising a single procedure - they need to understand why they are doing what they are doing and know when it is appropriate to use different methods. Students need to be flexible in order to choose an appropriate strategy for the numbers involved, and also be able to use one method to solve a problem and another method to check the results. An efficient strategy is one that the student can carry out easily, keeping track of sub-problems and making use of intermediate results to solve the problem.Īccuracy depends on several aspects of the problem-solving process, among them careful recording, knowledge of number facts and other important number relationships, and double-checking results.įlexibility requires the knowledge of more than one approach to solving a particular kind of problem, such as two-digit multiplication. Russell (2000) spells this out in more detail and suggests that fluency consists of three elements:Įfficiency - this implies that children do not get bogged down in too many steps or lose track of the logic of the strategy. Students exhibit computational fluency when they demonstrate flexibility in the computational methods they choose, understand and can explain these methods, and produce accurate answers efficiently. Standards have quite a lot to say about being fluent: We're not the only nation to take a recent interest in this - in the US the new ![]() ![]() ![]() However it's probably sensible to acknowledge that number is by far the largest part of the primary curriculum, so in this article we'll concentrate on that. The first thing to say is that fluency is not only about number - there are other areas of the curriculum where fluency is important.
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