Drilling basic number facts: Should we or should we not?

Abstract

This article describes the various changes in beliefs and practice that have occurred in relation to children's learning and recall of basic number facts. The writer also reports results from a survey involving the assessment of basic number knowledge of 2297 primary school children in South Australia. A comparison was made between their results and the results obtained when similar children were assessed on the same tests twenty years earlier. Children's overall performance in the recent testing was inferior to that assessed in 1975. The differences between the average scores in 1975 and in 1995 reached statistical significance (p < .01) in twenty‐three of the thirty‐two comparisons made. The decline in rapid recall of simple addition and subtraction facts was relatively minor, but poorer performance in recall of multiplication and division facts was more significant at all age levels. An argument is put forward that it is still very important for children to develop automaticity in recall of number facts in order to facilitate higher‐order processing in problem solving.