SpotOn hopes to bring awareness to best practices in math fact instruction and help provide resources that make those practices a reality.
What does the research say about math facts and how they are taught?
- Students must learn their facts through a variety of engaging, ongoing, interactive, rigorous, student friendly activities.
Fluency Doesn't Just Happen with Addition and Subtraction Dr. Nick Newton
- Brief, frequent, interactive activities that provide students with repeated exposure to math facts supports automaticity.
Mastering the Basic Math Facts in Multiplication and Division Susan O’Connell
- To build number sense, students need the opportunity to approach numbers in different ways, to see and use numbers visually, and to play around with different strategies for combining them. Unfortunately, most elementary classrooms ask students to memorize times tables and other number facts, often under time pressure, which research shows can seed math anxiety. It can actually hinder the development of number sense.
“Why Math Education in the U.S. Doesn't Add Up” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-math-education-in-the-u-s-doesn-t-add-up/
- Brain research has elucidated another practice that keeps many children from succeeding in math. Most mathematics classrooms in the U.S. equate skill with speed, valuing fast recall and testing even the youngest children against the clock. But studies show that kids manipulate math facts in their working memory—an area of the brain that can go off-line when they experience stress. Timed tests impair working memory in students of all backgrounds and achievement levels, and they contribute to math anxiety, especially among girls. By some estimates, as many as a third of all students, starting as young as age five, suffer from math anxiety.
- When teachers emphasize the memorization of facts, and give tests to measure number facts students suffer in two important ways. For about one third of students the onset of timed testing is the beginning of math anxiety (Boaler, 2014). Sian Beilock and her colleagues have studied people’s brains through MRI imaging and found that math facts are held in the working memory section of the brain. But when students are stressed, such as when they are taking math questions under time pressure, the working memory becomes blocked and students cannot access math facts they know (Beilock, 2011; Ramirez, et al, 2013). As students realize they cannot perform well on timed tests they start to develop anxiety and their mathematical confidence erodes. The blocking of the working memory and associated anxiety particularly occurs among higher achieving students and girls. Conservative estimates suggest that at least a third of students experience extreme stress around timed tests, and these are not the students who are of a particular achievement group, or economic background. When we put students through this anxiety provoking experience we lose students from mathematics.
https://www.youcubed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fluency-Without-Fear-1.28.15.pdf
These studies and experts establish timed test and quizzes are not the best practice. So why then are there still timed tests in classrooms across the country? My experience has been that the curriculum and resources are not there to match the research. Teachers have been told how to build a house without being given the tools to build it with. Motivated by this need SpotOn Math Facts curriculum was created to help provide teachers with all the essential tools for math fact mastery.
Our curriculum is a guide providing the practice students need in innovative and meaningful ways. Student success requires this practice on hundreds of facts. We provide teachers multimodal (visual, auditory and tactile), strategy based, organized practice that covers all of the facts. As a result of our curriculum being research based students are not only mastering their facts but gaining confidence!