Â鶹ÒùÔº

From classrooms to kitchen tables, debates about math education are never far away. Should teachers drill multiplication facts or encourage creative strategies to solve problems? The answer, especially among educators, is constantly evolving.

Daniel Ansari, professor of psychology and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, spoke with Western News to explain why 'arithmetic fluency' in young students remains foundational for learning and for life. Ansari weighs in on why the two approaches—learning arithmetic facts and problem solving—are not competing methods but go hand in hand.

What is arithmetic fluency?

The end goal of arithmetic fluency is to be able to quickly recall arithmetic facts that are the products of arithmetic operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This is the way in which arithmetic works, and arithmetic fluency is the ability to flexibly solve arithmetic problems and recall arithmetic facts from long-term memory.

Why is arithmetic fluency so important?

Arithmetic forms the basis of a lot of higher-level math, and if you do not have arithmetic fluency, you are going to spend a lot of mental effort solving problems using effortful strategies, such as counting on your fingers. That is going to not only slow you down but also make you more error prone.

Arithmetic fluency is also important in everyday life. For example, if you are doing some DIY at home and need to do addition, division or multiplication, arithmetic fluency will increase the overall efficiency of your project and hopefully the accuracy of what you are doing.

Is there a debate around how we get children to achieve arithmetic fluency?

There has been a constant debate in math education about whether we should be drilling facts and recall—that's memorization—or teaching understanding through lots of different strategies, what we call problem solving. This debate is pitting two things against one another, when they are actually complementary methods.

Where is this debate coming from?

That is a very difficult question, because things get simplified when you talk to policymakers who might say the issue is the curriculum or the way math has been taught. But if we went to five different elementary schools, we would observe very different ways of teaching. Teachers do not follow a script; the curriculum is an advisory of what the standards are, but how you get to those standards can vary. From science, we do not know the perfect way to teach math.

What is the science telling us about achieving arithmetic fluency?

What we do know from psychological science about the development of math skills more generally is that we need both memorization and problem solving. It's not a both sides argument as much as it's a developmental process that starts with building facts. Educators should:

• Monitor early knowledge of numbers and operations, ensuring students are on the path to fluency
• Provide explicit instruction to clearly and directly teach strategies and concepts
• Implement fact retrieval practice to reinforce strategies and learning; this builds an interconnected memory network
• Graduate to time-limited practice but only after students demonstrate accuracy in responses
• Allocate sufficient time for comparing different representations, strategies, discussion and reflection

What can parents or guardians do to help their children?

There is sometimes an issue of parents challenging what their children are being taught at school, because we have some vague memory that we did it differently. I think the first thing parents can do is not assume what is happening in their child's classroom is wrong just because it is different.

Do not assume that more instruction, such as tutoring, will always lead to better outcomes. I would also trust what is going on, unless you start to see real red flags—then you need to advocate for your child.

One of the things for parents to think about is that we sometimes tend to undervalue math or say, "I am not very good at math," or "I did not like math." Try not to transfer those attitudes to your kids, because we are finding a lot of children get turned off math not because they are not good at it, but because they develop certain attitudes towards it and start to avoid it.

In terms of practical suggestions, I would find fun ways to engage children, such as Snakes and Ladders. The game is very good for practicing addition and subtraction. Another idea is to ask your child to recall simple arithmetic facts during a casual moment like driving to soccer practice. Anything that can be done in a playful way that is not explicitly telling a child, "We are going to do math together now."