Reply To: Lesson 4-2: Automaticity vs. Memorization

[Lizann “Lizzie” Herrera]

Just last week, my director and I were working on an informational sheet to send out to teachers depicting just this: memorization vs. automaticity! I really like that you said that the goal for both is to know the answer quickly, however, the difference is how you get there. Memorization is almost like “numbers working in silos” – there’s no correlation to anything else.

The question then is, how do we know when students have achieved this? As a 3rd grade teacher, we taught the concepts of multiplication, the “groups of”, we did explorations, etc. but it got to a point where students then needed to show that automaticity, and if it wasn’t there, then rote memorization would be the way to learn them. How do we prevent this from happening? How do we know students have automaticity or they have just memorized the facts?

[Lizann “Lizzie” Herrera]

Just last week, my director and I were working on an informational sheet to send out to teachers depicting just this: memorization vs. automaticity! I really like that you said that the goal for both is to know the answer quickly, however, the difference is how you get there. Memorization is almost like “numbers working in silos” – there’s no correlation to anything else.

The question then is, how do we know when students have achieved this? As a 3rd grade teacher, we taught the concepts of multiplication, the “groups of”, we did explorations, etc. but it got to a point where students then needed to show that automaticity, and if it wasn’t there, then rote memorization would be the way to learn them. How do we prevent this from happening? How do we know students have automaticity or they have just memorized the facts?