Fact Fluency Assessment

Fact fluency assessment is so much more than how many answers kids can complete in a minute. Yes, It includes being fast, but it also includes being accurate, getting it correct, and being flexible. Yet we usually only use fact fluency assessment to see how fast and how accurate they are. So how do we assess all three parts? Well, today I want to talk to you about Math Running Records by Dr. Nicki Newton.

Fact Fluency Assessment & CGI Stages

First, I want to give you a brief overview of the three key pieces to fact fluency and the CGI stages that kids go through as they’re developing their facts. The first piece is fluency. I personally love Susan Jo Russell’s definition of fluency because it’s simple and concise. They need accuracy, efficiency and flexibility.

That is also seen in the Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) stages. The research of CGI showed us that as kids are developing their strategies for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, they will fall into these four stages. Sometimes they’re in between stages. They’ll be in one stage for one type of problem and another stage for another type of problem. But basically, it boils down to these four stages.

Fact Fluency Assessment & CGI Stages

There’s direct modeling, which is when a kid has to model every single piece of the problem. So in addition, that looks like 3 + 4 where they’ll count out 3 and all 4. Then they have to come back and count everything over again to figure out the total. This also happens in multiplication. If a child is doing 3 x 4, they will make 3 groups of 4, whether they draw it out or use manipulatives. Then they come back and count every single thing that they drew or every single thing that they counted.

Counting, Derived Facts, Facts

Once kids start moving out of that stage, they’ll move into the counting phase. For addition, with the 3 + 4, kids will hold the 3 in their head and then count on 4 more. In multiplication, this tends to look like skip counting. If I’m doing 3 x 4, they will skip count 4, 3 times. Now what’s hard is that once kids get to that phase, we tend to start quizzing kids with flashcards and timed tests to hopefully get them faster and more accurate. However, if they don’t know it, they fall all the way back down to the counting phase.

The in-between phase is where that flexibility that Susan Jo Russell talked about comes into play. This phase is called derived facts. Derived facts is where kids are using something that they know to help them with something they don’t know. For the 3 + 4 example, a kid might say something like 3 + 3 = 6, so one more gives me 7. The kid who’s doing the multiplication of 3 x 4, may know that 2 x 4 = 8 and they just need 1 more 4 to help them out. It’s using something they know to help them with something they don’t know, and that’s really what flexibility is all about.

How to Assess Flexibility

Part 1

How do we assess that? I have become a big fan of Dr. Nicki Newton’s Math Running Records. Basically, there are three parts to Math Running Records. Start with making a list of specifically selected problems. Give them the problems. Then begin assessing. If they are automatic, circle “a”. If it took around 5 seconds, then you circle the “5s”. However if it was prolonged thinking time, then you circle the “pth” for prolonged thinking time.

Part 2

Once they’ve done that piece and they’re just giving you the answers, the next stage is to question them about the types of strategies they have for the types of problems given. For example, the first problem is plus 0. With this problem, you’re asking them about a strategy and what they know about what happens for plus 0. There are ones for doubles. Do they understand doubles? What about doubles + 1? So, you can go through this questioning piece.

Now, here’s the part where I fudge it a bit. If I notice in the first piece that they are counting on their fingers for every single problem and didn’t use other strategies, then when I’m questioning them about strategies, I’m not going to take the time and ask them their strategy for every problem. I’m just going to mark it down as they did not have flexibility because I didn’t see them using it. If they are showing some flexibility or I couldn’t tell how they solved it and they just gave me an answer, then I’m going to use that second piece of questioning.

“When you’re solving a problem like ____, do you have a strategy for that?” “What do you do when you’re adding something to 10? Is there something you know about adding to 10?”

You want to dig a little bit to find out about their strategies to find their flexibility. Same is true for multiplication. There are certain types of facts that led to strategies. Kids should be using times 2 to help them with times 4. That’s a great strategy. But if they’re sitting there doing skip counting, they’re not using strategies. You can decide not to go through all of the questions if you notice that the kids aren’t using strategies.

Part 3

The third piece is questions about the disposition they have around mathematics and around their growth mindset. If you have time, these are really great questions to ask the kids to gain more insight into how they view mathematics. Personally, when I’m trying to do an assessment on a class of 25 kids, I don’t always have the time to do the full piece.

So, I found the questions about disposition to sometimes be optional. If you ask Dr. Nicki, she will probably say it’s not. But the reality is, sometimes we have to make tough decisions about what to do with your time. I did ask on a few occasions because it is kind of interesting to see what they say. Look at this one. She says, “Yes, I’m a fan of math, “but it’s hard.”

That was pretty fun to see. Sometimes it’s really cool to see those insights of how kids think about mathematics. But again, I found it could be optional if you don’t have time to get through those pieces.

Why you should be doing Running Records to assess fact fluency

Lastly, I’d like to talk to you about why you should be doing Running Records. At the beginning of this school year, I used the addition Running Record with a group of third graders because I knew they were jumping straight into multiplication. If kids really aren’t solid with addition and have strategies for it, it can really impact their ability to make sense of multiplication. Well, they can make sense of what multiplication is, but to develop their fluency, it really does help if they are fluent in addition first. Even with subtraction too. So I wanted to test that out.

One of the things that I found very interesting was that there were definitely kids who got them all correct, but they had no strategies. There were other kids who got them all correct but their only strategy was just counting on their fingers. So they got them correct, but they were slow and their efficiency was really low.

The other interesting thing I saw that was that speed does not tell me that they had it.

If you look at this piece, the scoring at the bottom shows her speed was not that great. She was mainly in the, 5 seconds and she had “prolonged thinking time” on some. On others she scored automatic, so I put her at a 1.5. But the cool part was she was very accurate. She got all of them correct. Her flexibility was the coolest part.

When I went to the second part, she had strategies for every single one of the problems. The hard part was just that she wasn’t fast with those strategies yet. They weren’t automatic. She knew how to make 10s and use doubles to help her out but she wasn’t quick with them.

Now on a normal timed test, that child and this child would probably score the same.

Their speed was about the same. It took them a little longer to solve the problems. But they got them all right every single time. The difference between the two kids was in their flexibility. When I asked this child about their strategies, it was all counting.

On a timed test, you don’t know the strategies your kids are using. All you see is the end result and how many they got right in that minute. But it’s not telling you how they’re approaching the problem. So if you’re using those assessments to determine if a kid needs some extra work or some intervention, you’re not getting a fully accurate view of where the student is. They might just need more practice to become more fluent and a little bit faster. They’ve got the strategies, the number sense and the connections made. They just need to become more fluent with it by developing their speed. On the other hand, the child with low speed & low flexibility needs to develop a whole lot more number sense and understanding around addition to become more flexible. Then their speed will increase.

One of the cool things that I saw was that every kid who had high speed also had high flexibility. I did not see any kids who had really high speed but low flexibility in this classroom. I’m sure that sometimes that happens. But in this classroom, that was not the case when I was doing assessments. The only kids who had high speed were kids who had high flexibility. They had strategies. They weren’t just relying on their fingers and they weren’t just relying upon that they knew it. It wasn’t just memorized. So I want to encourage you to try out Running Records, whether it’s for addition or multiplication. I would definitely start with one of those. Subtraction and division would come later after you’ve assessed addition and multiplication.

So there’s links below that will take you to the download for each one of those. I’d like you to find a couple of your kiddos who maybe have that low flexibility that you would like to work with, because coming up, I have a free five-day training on how to work with those kids using number talks to develop their fact fluency by building their number sense. So I’d really like you to try out the Running Records assessment. Find a kid, maybe two, that you’d like to work with over five days. It’s going to be quick, 5 to 10 minute exercise each day that you’re going to do with that child, and we’ll see how their fact fluency develops over just five days.

Click Here for the Math Running Record templates from Dr. Nicki Newton

Check out the assessment, try it out with your kiddos. I hope that this has helped you build your math minds so that you can go out there and build the math minds of your students.

The training invitation at the end of this video is now past. But the training is available in the Build Math Minds PD Site for our members. Want to learn more about membership and get on the waitlist>> go here.