Math at Home

To assess fluency, we administer the “CGI Number Facts Strategy Assessment”. This particular assessment asks the student to explain the strategy they used when solving subtraction, multiplication and/or division math facts. A student is considered fluent with a fact if they can answer the question accurately within 3 seconds. During the assessment, the students see a paper with just the math facts on it. For some of the math facts, we ask students to share how they arrived at the answer. Then, we record their responses and strategies on a separate sheet. To be considered fluent, students need to answer 16 or more of the 18 questions correctly and within 3 seconds. We encourage students to use “friendly facts” to arrive at their answers, so for example, for 6x8, a student might do 5x8= 40 and then add 8 more to get to 48. Inherent in this type of strategy is the ability to know that they can break up the number of groups, and also the ability to use working memory to manipulate the numbers. If students answered 16 or more correctly for the multiplication questions, they then moved on to the division questions.