An Effective Tool for Motivating Students to Learn Multiplication Facts

Research shows the best way for students to learn math facts  is practicing for about 7 minutes daily.  With this in mind, we gave a class of students a teacher made sheet of multiplication facts in which none repeated with the commutative property.  So if there was a 2×3 fact on the page, this fact didn’t repeat with a 3×2.  We timed the students almost daily beginning with five minutes to complete a page of 66 problems 2’s through 12’s facts.  Students would count the number they left blank and that they missed and record this on their page.  Then their teacher and students would call out all the answers chorally to check.  Next their teacher would record the number students missed on a chart.  Every week, after students had felt some success, the time was moved down by 30 seconds until the time was equal to 2 seconds per problem (or 2 minutes and 12 seconds).  This method proved to be effective for most students because we encouraged them to get just one more right each time.  Below is a picture of the chart which shows students times.  Each different colored row is when the time changed which you can see listed at the top of each column.  The chart shows a time period of about four weeks. Even if students didn’t make it to the goal of answering each problem within two seconds, they made drastic improvements from their beginning test.  Ideally more time would have been spent on practicing, however the end of the year was upon us.  I was so proud of these kiddos!