Alison asks:
Hi Dr. Don,
Quick question for you. A student has passed out of an operation while in first grade. The next year his new teacher moves him back to addition based on his two minute timing score. Should a student ever be made to go back and redo an operation based on two minute timings or once they have passed out they should get to stay? Should the two minute timings be used that way? I just reread the teacher directions but am unclear about this. Thanks for any insight on this.
Answer
Alison,
Sorry, there are no quick questions with me! The teacher directions did not specify any criteria of performance on a 2-minute timing upon which to put a student “back” into an operation. Really, I don’t know what that criteria would be. The 2-minute timings can’t really be failed, as they are just used to measure progress. There are few absolute criteria other than “as fast as his fingers can carry him” when it comes to math fact fluency. The criteria that represents “as fast as his fingers can carry him” in first grade is no longer the case in second grade–and the student can be expected to do more. But that does not mean that the student must start over practicing addition again, because if he went through the levels of Rocket Math Addition he probably knows the addition facts pretty well.
More to the point, we want that second grader to learn subtraction during this school year, so he is ready for multiplication facts in third grade. So I would say that given that the student has worked through the levels in Rocket Math Addition based on last year’s writing speed, he would benefit MOST from working through subtraction at this point.
If a second grade student gets through subtraction before the year is out, then it would be a terrific idea to have that student go back and get faster at Addition. Students can always get faster at math facts, but we don’t want to hold them back from learning the other operations unless they really haven’t had a chance to finish learning the prior operation–based on the fact they didn’t get through all the levels.
Also, it is not a good idea to test students at the start of the school year on math facts and then make placement decisions based on that performance. Students are bound to be slow after the summer. [As noted in another post, we wouldn’t want to put them back to beginning of an operation based on slow performance at the end of the summer.] Instead, let them practice for a week or two and bring those facts back into the forefront of their minds before deciding that they have to start all over again. On that basis (a slow test performance after the summer before any chance to practice) almost every student would have to do addition over again, year after year. And as the student’s writing speed increases every year, the goals would increase and the challenge would be increased, making it a real job to get through the levels each year. The student might never get a chance to learn subtraction, multiplication, division, factors, integers and all the rest of the programs they should learn.