Facts Forever

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Facts Forever is a whole school program designed to develop fluency in key facts across Foundation to Year 10. Designed and tested in schools, Facts Forever is designed to align with the Australian Curriculum and relevant state curricula while drawing on evidence-based principles.

We want to be clear from the outset that fluency is simply one component of a successful mathematics program. We do not advocate for only fluency, nor that every piece of learning or instruction should be timed. We believe that students need work with three components during mathematical lessons: Conceptual, Fluency and Procedural (Powell et al, 2023) .

This program is designed to work solely on the fluency component. Mike Nelson Maths provides additional support developing conceptual and procedural learning separately to Facts Forever.

 Fluency is more than simply working quickly. Fluency involves performing a skill accurately, efficiently, and with enough automaticity that it can be used reliably and retained over time. As learners become fluent, they move beyond laborious strategies such as counting, especially for larger numbers and begin retrieving answers automatically. At this stage, the skill feels effortless and can be applied with little conscious thought. Focusing only on accuracy overlooks an essential component of competence—the ability to perform efficiently enough for the skill to be useful in real-world contexts. We can describe students who are fluent as ‘flowing, flexible, effortless, errorless, automatic, confident, second nature and masterful’ (Johnson and Street, 2013).

Following Baroody (2011), Facts Forever views fact fluency as both rapid and accurate recall of number facts and the ability to use those facts efficiently when solving mathematical problems.

At a minimum, math fact retrieval is typically considered fluent when performed accurately within 2 to 3 seconds (Burns et al., 2010; Stickney et al, 2012), and the efficiency refers to students’ ability to apply fact knowledge to more complex mathematical skills and concepts (Morano et al., 2020). This definition of fact fluency considers both declarative knowledge (i.e., basic fact recall) and conceptual knowledge, or deeper understanding of number concepts and ability to apply this knowledge flexibly (Morano et al., 2020).

Given the role it plays in mathematics achievement, fact fluency is an important concern for students with disabilities and difficulties in mathematics, as these groups of students often demonstrate consistent and persistent deficits with fluent retrieval of math facts (Geary, 2004; Geary et al., 2007).

Students who lack fact fluency can experience high cognitive load and frustration when learning more complex materials (Jitendra et al., 2007). Fluent fact retrieval can facilitate a student’s ability to execute complex procedures accurately because their cognitive resources are not consumed by retrieving facts (Tronsky, 2005). 

  Facts Forever is created through the lens of the big ideas (Charles, 2005).  Students move through the big ideas, which slowly increase the level of complexity of thinking required by the students. Within each Big Idea, students engage with units of work until mastery is achieved.

Each big idea and unit is mapped to the curriculum. Whilst we include a recommended scope and sequence for schools to follow, we encourage staff to review their student needs as well as the practicality of school life before implementing the program.

  Within the units, Facts Forever is guided by several principles.

The first principle is that maths is hierarchical (Xu et al., 2023). Because of this, it is important that students begin at their point of need during fluency practice and then progress up to ‘grade level’ work. For example, students in Grade 3 who should be working on multi-digit addition will find this hard if they have not developed fluency in the facts to 20. 

The second principle is teaching the four operations through clusters (quote). This not only decreases the cognitive load by reducing the number of facts being taught at a single time, but it also allows students to see the connection between groups of facts, such as the near doubles being 1 more than the doubles they have just learnt.

The third principle is that fluency should never come before accuracy. Before implementing any program involving speed, educators need to ensure students are accurate with the chosen skill before focusing on rate. If students are inaccurate, they are within the acquisition phase of learning (Haring et al, 1978; VanDerHeyden & Peltier, 2024). 

Facts Forever moves students through the following phases within each unit:

Screener - Diagnostic Assessment - Strategy Instruction - Mastery Practice - Summative Assessment

During strategy instruction, students learn ways of reasoning about facts by noticing relationships, patterns, and number structures that help them work out unknown facts and build connected mathematical understanding. (Baroody et al., 2009; Isaacs & Carroll, 1999). 

It is important that strategy learning is seen as a ‘bridge’ rather than a ‘destination’. Like segmenting and blending in Reading, we want students to have an approach if they do not know a fact, but we want to move them to automaticity. During this phase, Facts Forever includes a series of mini lessons for introducing a strategy for solving the fact. These are by no means comprehensive, and educators can supplement them with other lessons around building the strategies. The mini lessons are designed to be 5-10 minutes long to match the fluency practice timing. 

Once students have the strategies, we move into mastery practice. During mastery practice, students engage in numerous structured opportunities to respond to carefully selected fact combinations. The purpose is to strengthen accuracy, increase retrieval speed, and move knowledge towards automatic recall. (Clarke, et al., 2016). It is important to note, however, that we are not asking students to ‘rote’ memorise anything. Students are building off their strategy instruction, which provides the context for students about how the facts are working. We are also not allowing students to ‘choose their own adventure’ with the teacher being a passive observer. Characteristics of effective mastery-practice activities include teacher modelling (Codding et al., 2011), many opportunities to respond (Kubina & Yurick, 2012), immediate affirmative or corrective feedback (Fuchs et al., 2008), and an appropriate ratio of known to unknown facts (Burns, 2005).

Studies have found that a combined approach to fluency instruction, or the practice of using both explicit strategy instruction and mastery practice, can improve both automaticity and generalisation (Ok and Bryant, 2016;Woodward, 2006).

Facts Forever uses a range of interventions that have been empirically demonstrated to increase students’ ability to fluently respond to basic math facts, which include:

· Cover, Copy and Compare (Poncy et al., 2012);

· Taped Problems (Poncy et al., 2006)

· Flash Cards (Fuchs et al., 2021)

· Worksheets (Fuchs et al., 2021) 

· Incremental Rehearsal (Burns et al., 2019);

· Constant time delay (CTD; Koscinski & Gast, 1993);

An effective approach to developing fluency combines explicit strategy teaching with ongoing mastery practice. Teachers first introduce and model a strategy to build students’ conceptual understanding, then follow this with short, regular practice sessions that strengthen accurate and efficient fact retrieval. Practice activities should include a balanced mix of newly learned and previously mastered facts to support retention through distributed practice.

For example, a teacher may explicitly teach a strategy such as the doubles fact strategy at the beginning of the week. In the days that follow, students briefly revisit the strategy while engaging in targeted fluency activities. To maintain engagement, different practice formats can be used across the week, such as cover-copy-compare worksheets, incremental rehearsal activities, and taped-problems exercises. Practice is most effective when teachers explicitly teach the expectations, routines, materials, and procedures associated with each activity, ensuring students can focus their attention on developing fluency.

Fluency practice can become repetitive if the same activities are used repeatedly. Teachers who actively encourage effort, celebrate improvement, and create a sense of challenge are more likely to keep students engaged and motivated. This can be achieved by setting clear performance targets (e.g., aiming for a specific number of correct digits per minute), introducing friendly challenges, and providing regular feedback on progress. A key focus during fluency instruction should be creating as many opportunities as possible for students to respond and practise, as high rates of active participation are essential for building accuracy and automaticity.

  Advancement occurs when students consistently demonstrate the required level of automaticity and accuracy. Meeting established fluency benchmarks indicates readiness for increasingly complex fact sets, which for most units is 40 correct responses (or digits correct) per minute, which is consistent with research that has shown that this level of fluency produces skill retention, maintenance, and generalization (Poncy et al., 2012).

 The program is designed to be delivered in short daily sessions, typically lasting between five and ten minutes, allowing fluency practice to be embedded within existing mathematics routines.

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Morano, S., Randolph, K., Markelz, A. M., & Church, N. (2020). Combining explicit strategy instruction and mastery practice to build arithmetic fact fluency. Teaching Exceptional Children, 53(1), 60–69.

Ok, M. W., & Bryant, D. P. (2016). Effects of a strategic intervention with iPad practice on the multiplication fact performance of fifth-grade students with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 39(3), 146–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731948715598285

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Xu, C., Di Lonardo Burr, S., & LeFevre, J.-A. (2023). The hierarchical relations among mathematical competencies: From fundamental numeracy to complex mathematical skills. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(4), 284–295.