Building Fluency as a Key Ingredient for Learning Success!
Posted: 2009-10-15
In both regular and special education environments, most students are graded or evaluated based on the accuracy of their performance regardless of the amount time it takes them to complete a particular task. That is, a student who accurately completed a math test in 60 minutes is just as masterful with the math material as a student who only required half that amount of time to accurately complete the test. Unfortunately, in the absence of the dimension of time, this is exactly the assumption made when given only half of the information needed to access true mastery of a particular skill.
As a leading figure in the field of education and Precision Teaching once remarked “you can take behavior out of time, but you can’t take time out of the behavior”. In other words, everything we do requires a certain amount of time. In many instances, the time in which it takes us to perform certain tasks or engage in a particular behavior is of up-most importance.
Imagine if you will if you were a very accurate dresser in the morning, but unfortunately it took you at least 2 hours to correctly complete each component of your dressing routine. This obvious lack of fluency in a skill that most of us takes for granted will surely hinder your ability to make it to work, school or appointments on time, especially if you are not in the habit of waking up hours before you actually have to be somewhere important.
For some reason, many of us can easily recognize the importance of fluency is these types of examples. However, this seems to be a widely overlooked concept in the education world. In order to truly access the impact of instruction on learning and performance or how well we do something, the dimension of time, in addition to accuracy, must also be included to complete the definition of what is means to be truly competent or fluent, in a particular skill or behavior.
Other terms used to describe fluent performance includes “easy to do, really knows it, smooth, remembered, can apply, automatic, can use it, and confident” (Binder, 1996). By adding the dimension of time into measures of performance, whether it’s for academic, language, or self-help based skills, we give students the opportunity to reach their fullest potential and break through the performance ceilings imposed by measures of accuracy only.
Students given opportunities to build and attain fluent performance are more likely to benefit from outcomes associated with fluency such as retaining the skill when instruction has stopped, performing the skill for as long as necessary, increased resistance to distractions, and application of learned skills to new learning situations.
