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

[Alyse Olivieri]

I teach middle schoolers and often wonder why some of the students know their multiplication facts and some do not. I also find it interesting that some of the students know their multiplication facts but do have automaticity. I agree that automaticity is a better, more useful way to learn your math facts. It seems to me that students who learned their facts through automaticity have more number sense than students who learned through memorization . I will say that I had a student this year who knew his multiplication facts (by memorization) but needed to work on number sense. This student was very proud of himself because he was always the first person to answer when we needed to know the product of 2 numbers. The fact that he knew his multiplication facts gave him great confidence which helped him when he so often felt like he was not so good at math. So although I recommend automaticity for learning multiplication facts, I still feel that it is better to learn through memorization, then not to learn the multiplication facts at all.