What is Fact Fluency?
Math fact fluency refers to the ability to recall the basic facts in all four operations accurately, quickly and effortlessly. When students achieve automaticity with these facts, they have attained a level of mastery that enables them to retrieve them from long-term memory without conscious effort or attention. Brain imaging studies have revealed how the progression from effortful processes such as finger counting and explicit strategy use to automatized retrieval is associated with actual changes in the regions of the brain involved in mathematical computation (e.g.,Rivera, Reiss, Eckert, & Menon, 2005). Through automaticity, students free up their working memory and can devote it to problem-solving and learning new concepts and skills (Geary, 1994).