Fluency Practice: Techniques for Building Automaticity in Foundational Knowledge and Skills

Achieving fluency in basic facts and skills is an important learning outcome needed for academic growth. Fluency is a type of skill mastery characterized by a combination of accuracy and speed, and it has numerous benefits. For instance, fluency promotes the successful and quick use of the practiced skill, fosters maintenance across time, and aids development of closely related and more complex skills. To help students achieve fluency with basic skills, special educators can design and deliver fluency practice comprised of several critical components: timed practice, goal setting, modeling, performance feedback, reinforcement, error correction, and self-monitoring. This article defines each of these core components and describes how to incorporate them into a synergistic schedule of fluency practice. Specific guidance is provided for oral reading, math computation, and text writing.