Automaticity & Math Fluency Educational Applications

In my last post I discussed three key questions for teachers to consider when selecting educational applications to meet students' goals and objectives. This post I want to focus more specifically on what kinds of educational applications can be used to address automaticity and math fluency. Before getting started, I wanted to address the question what does automaticity and math fluency entail?

Automaticity refers to the fast, accurate, and effortless processing of content information. Automaticity is also referred to as math fact fluency. 

Students with disabilities often have difficulty reaching benchmarks in automaticity and math fluency because they need more instruction, practice, and reinforcement than their peers. Additionally they have difficulty remembering as many facts as their peers, fail to transfer the facts to long-term memory, and have difficulty retrieving those math facts quickly. So, how can we help? There are educational applications specifically designed to support automaticity and math fluency

• FASTT Math (Fluency and Automaticity through Systematic Teaching with Technology)

• Assesses students' command of basic facts by measuring response time and then generates customized activities based on the results.
• Students progress through the customized series of activities to strengthen memorization of facts and eliminate the need to rely on counting strategies to solve problems. 

• Timez Attack
  
• Solely focuses on multiplication facts, teaching the 2 to 12 times tables.
• Engages students in a high-tech video game environment featuring high-quality graphics. 

• ArithmAttack
  
• Practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, division facts.
• Customized problem sets are easily generated by setting the highest and lowest numbers to use so students' practice can be targeted to their particular areas of need. 

• Arcademic Skill Builder

• Math games are designed to help develop automaticity in addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, integers, fractions, and ratios.
• Various speeds of the game- slow, normal, fast. 

My favorite part about these educational applications was that only a limited number of keys are required to control the games so they could easily become accessible to students who are unable to use the standard keyboard or mouse!

Amy G. Dell, Deborah A. Newton, Jerry G. Petroff. Assistive Technology in the Classroom: Enhancing the School Experiences of Students with Disabilities. (Chapter 5) 2012. Second Edition.