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OAKLAND, CA–The Consortium of Reaching Excellence in Education, an organization dedicated to the promotion of science-based classroom practices, launched a new report on the relation between mathematical fluency and number sense. Titled “Fluency and Number Sense Work Together”, the resource is part of the Spring 2018 edition of the CORE Academic Quarterly Newsletter.
More information can be found at https://www.corelearn.com/core-academic-quarterly-newsletter-spring-2018.
The new resource aims to help educators improve their teaching efficiency by combining various fluency activities in a way that promotes the development of numerical sense.
Described in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics as the “skill in carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently, and appropriately”, fluency requires the ability to work with numbers quickly and appropriately towards solving a variety of problems.
The report shows that memorization is an important part of fluency since it allows working memory to focus on new information rather than wasting resources on the retrieval of facts. By combining rote rehearsal with elaborate rehearsal, children can improve their retention of mathematical facts and algorithms, thus freeing up more resources to focus on higher-order problem solving and new information processing.
A suggested activity for developing fluency and number sense is Sprints, a series of increasingly difficult problems focused on practice with facts and skills. The goal of the activity is to complete the series of problems as quickly as possible, thus contributing to improved memory and promoting pattern recognition and number sense development.
The report concludes that “the key to adapting fluency activities to deepen number sense is to pause from solving problems and to focus on understanding the mathematics. This often requires asking a few timely questions that promote reasoning and discourse about mathematical relationships, and providing multiple methods for visualizing and understanding ideas and connections.”
Interested parties can find more information by visiting the above-mentioned website or visiting https://www.corelearn.com/.
Release ID: 381051