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Measures & Interventions for Numeracy Development
M.I.N.D. 2.0 - FACTS ON FIRE
Facts on Fire is an empirically-supported standard protocol math intervention program that is implemented daily for 5-10 minutes. It was designed to be used school-wide to increase students computation fluency and has been shown to significantly increase schools math achievement scores. In addition to providing a high quality systems level intervention, it can also be adapted to support multi-tiered systems of support and intensive intervention in math. To accomplish these goals schools schedule daily practice time after morning announcements and students move through a pre-determined sequence of skills as mastery criteria are met. To prepare Facts on Fire for your school or classroom, simply select a target skill, download & print the student workbooks, and download & save the PowerPoint smartboard lessons for easy access and implementation.
Facts on Fire is guided by three aspects of system change: breadth of impact, efficient use of resources, and likelihood of success. Breadth of impact refers to the degree of influence a change has on the system in which it is made. Efficient use of resources refers to changes that improve the efficiency with which sites employ currently available resources. Likelihood of success refers to the probability that the goal is accomplishable under the current conditions in a reasonable time frame. Facts on Fire follows these principles to result in marked improvement in student math achievement outcomes.
How Facts on Fire Looks in Your Classroom
Facts on Fire consists of a standard set of daily lessons (usually 30 or 45 days). Students either sit in front of the smartboard and chorally respond or sit at their desks and write their answers. The PowerPoint presentation reads lesson directions and provides cues for starting, guiding, and stopping intervention procedures while the teacher either signals student choral responding or cycles the room providing encouragement and praise for adhering to and completing tasks. Each day students set goals and count the number of problems completed to ensure continued improvement. Each week the teacher has a "celebration" day where students look at weekly growth to earn a classwide reward!
How to Implement Facts on Fire at your School
Step 1: Buy-In, Essential Roles, & Required Resources
Before implementing Facts on Fire it is critical that administration & faculty are bought in and recognize the need for a supplemental program to target skill fluency to support math instruction at their school. An essential roles to ensure implementation fidelity is to identify a site-based coach to oversee the Facts on Fire program. The coach will need to oversee and manage the program and will include knowledge of the website to locate materials for printing, distribution of materials to classrooms, and organizing data to support incentive plans and report outcomes. They will also be needed to provide training, feedback, and troubleshooting to teachers. Ideally, the school would identify grade level leads to support collaboration between grade level teachers and the administration and coach. Outside of these costs, plus the 5-10 daily minutes of instructional time, all resources are free!
Step 2: Establishing Vertical Alignment of Critical Math Skills
One problem with math instruction is that core programs fail to provide systematic practice on critical skills for students to achieve computation fluency due to the volume of skills and concepts taught across the year. Facts on Fire identifies a handful of 3-5 critical skills each year for students to consistently practice and master. While we provide a recommended scope & sequence, due to curricular variability school level teams will need to review and plan when to introduce skills targeted with Facts on Fire. A great question to get this started is to ask each grade level what skills they expect students entering their classroom to have mastered (skills that are needed to learn grade level material). Facts on Fire was not designed to introduce skills but to provide ample practice opportunities after the skill has been taught. This task will provide a year long plan defining the scope & sequence of target skills.
Step 3: Establish and Confirm Daily Implementation & Treatment Fidelity
After resources have been procured, the scope & sequence has been defined, and training has been provided the school needs to ensure daily implementation. To obtain desired growth rates, it is imperative that every class and every student participate each day in the Facts on Fire program. Second, teachers must be active participants by walking around the room and providing behavior specific praise to students for task adherence and effort. Students should be acutely aware that their teacher sees fact fluency as an essential math skill. It is also important that administrators and/or coaches conduct spot-checks to provide performance feedback to classroom teachers on treatment fidelity.
Step 4: Ensure Student Engagement
As with any instructional program it is critical that students are engaged in effortful participation to maximize outcomes. To assist with this the Facts on Fire contains two components. 1) Daily goal setting by each student and 2) Weekly celebration day lead by the teacher. Each day students count the number of completed problems on the 1-minute Facts on Fire assessment and record the number of problems completed and their level (warm, hot, on fire, or nuclear). Students are challenged to give their best effort and work hard to improve over the previous day. Once per week the teacher leads a celebration day (usually Friday) where the class is informed of a behavior (number of problems completed), a criteria (+2 problems compared to last week), a group of students to be selected (row 3 students), and then a classwide reward is drawn. One of the goals of the Facts on Fire program is to get teachers interacting with students about their effort and subsequent growth and underscores the importance of teacher buy-in that computation fluency is an important and meaningful skill.
GRADE LEVEL SCOPE & SEQUENCE W/ MASTERY CRITERIA
FACTS ON FIRE: TARGET SKILL WORKBOOK & LESSON LINKS
Student Workbooks
PowerPoint Lessons
Lesson Videos
The M.I.N.D. 2.0 - Facts on Fire materials were created to provide teachers with resources to provide focused, high intensity fact practice at the classroom level. The intervention components for a majority of the target skills consists of Taped Problems with a small set of probelms to ensure accurate responding and then Explicit Timing to provide opportunities for retrieval practice. As students progress through more problems Explicit Timing interventions provide interleaved practice across the growing problem sets.
See Mrs. Stam lead these interventions below!
See Mrs. Stam lead & signal her class to chorally respond to the Taped Problems section of the M.I.N.D. 2.0 - Facts on Fire program to beat the tape.
Here Mrs. Stam's class competes the Taped Problems in their workbooks by writing their answers. After this they complete a Facts on Fire 1 minute timing to beat yesterdays score!
Mrs. Stams class engages in high rates of retrieval practice as they complete 2 - 2 minute warming up timings before their 1 minute Facts on Fire timing to see if the beat their previous score.
To keep engagement high and celebrate classwide success watch Mrs. Stam use an interdependent group contingency with randomized targets to reward hard work & improved student fact fluency!
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