Math fact fluency

Math fact fluency is the quick and effortless (automatic) recall of basic math facts. 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.

Research Highlights

• Working Memory
• Automaticity & the Brain
• How Fact Fluency Affects Learning in Mathematics
• Read the full Reflex White Paper (PDF)

Extensive research has demonstrated the critical role of fact fluency in elementary school level mathematics and beyond and is underscored by studies that show it is a significant predictor of performance on standardized tests.

Furthermore, the significance of fact retrieval speed as a predictor of performance is not limited to test items that directly assess computation — it predicts performance on math concept problems, word problems, data interpretation problems, and mathematical reasoning items as well.

Research over the past decade has also shown, however, that many children in the United States never achieve sufficient proficiency with math facts, and those who do typically achieve it later than their peers in nations with higher mathematics achievement. To address this issue, recent national curriculum standards and guidelines have highlighted automaticity with math facts as a core objective of elementary mathematics education, including:

The Reflex System

The Reflex system combines research-proven methods and innovative technology to provide the most effective math fact fluency solution available.

Research Highlights

• A Four-Step Process
• Why Reflex Games Work
• Motivation
• Read the full Reflex White Paper (PDF)

A few of the factors behind Reflex's success:

1. The system is based on a fact family approach that builds on and reinforces important mathematical concepts such as the commutative property and the relationship between the operations. When students understand the conceptual connections between facts, their progress to automaticity is accelerated.
2. Reflex is highly adaptive and individualized so that students of all ability levels have early and ongoing success. In addition, the system consistently rewards students for both their effort and progress toward automaticity. They come to understand that if they are willing to put in the work, they really can succeed in math.
3. Reflex fluency development games are different. Unlike typical math fact games, they require students to engage in increasingly complex and fast-paced decision making. Once students have developed the ability to fluently answer math facts while simultaneously achieving game objectives, you can be confident that they will be able to do the same while learning new math concepts and procedures in your classroom.
4. Reflex is continually improving based on detailed analysis of student response patterns. Hundreds of thousands of students have become fluent with tens of millions of new facts and ExploreLearning's researchers continuously comb that data to uncover opportunities to further optimize the system. Today's Reflex is more effective than yesterday's, and tomorrow's will be better still.