Definitions & Technical Stuff

Educators have taken these notions of fluency a step further. They have promoted and developed expert-level performance by providing learning opportunities that encourage progressively faster and more accurate performances ( Binder, 1984; Haughton, 1972; Johnson & Layng, 1992); Kelly, 1995; Lindsley, 1992 ). While it seems clear that fluency training is not necessary to achieve high level performance, fast and accurate practice does achieve such outcomes.

Why Build Fluency?
Education and training programs based upon principles of learning have demonstrated the power of building fluency ( Lindsley, 1971; Lindsley, 1972; Lindsley, 1990; Lindsley, 1992 ). For example, elementary school children showed achievement gains between 20 and 40 percentile over a three year period with the addition of just 30 minutes of daily fluency practice of core skills (Beck & Clement, 1991). Similar dramatic gains have been shown with children with learning difficulties, college students, and adults in a literacy program( Johnson & Layng, 1992, Johnson & Layng, 1994). The techniques have proven useful and transferable to the training of sales people as well (Binder & Bloom, 1989).

What are the outcomes of building fluency?
There is evidence that fluent repertoires coincide with improved:

• Retention - more likely to be remembered even with periods of non-practice (Orgel, 1984).
• Endurance- more durable in that they can be performed over protracted periods and in the presence of distractions (Binder, Haughton & Van Eyk, 1990).
• Application- more likely to extend to new situations or recombine in unique ways (Johnson & Layng, 1994).

What kinds of practice promote fluency?
We have known for some time that learning beyond 100% accuracy has benefits (Kruger, 1929). And we appreciate that developing expert-level performance does not come easily, but the payoffs appear to be worth the effort. More recently, Ericsson and his colleagues Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) have examined the characteristics of experts. They have and observed that experts in many diverse fields such as athletics, music, science and chess playing have an extensive history of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves isolation of core, component skills, and repeated practice until the behaviors occur accurately and quickly. This kind of practice has been explicitly used by Precision Teachers (Haughton, 1980; Lindsley, 1992) to build fluency with tool skills. One such practice method uses flash cards called SAFMEDS, an acronym describing the practice method: Say All Fast Minute Each Day Shuffle.

SAFMEDS
The very nature of SAFMEDS makes the development of fluency explicit. The learner does a timing during which the deck of cards are practiced. As each card is exposed, the learner sees the "see side" which might be a question, a definition, or a phrase, and responds by saying the "say side" which might be the answer to the question, the defined term, or another phrase related to the front of the card. These practice sessions are carefully timed so that the speed of correct and incorrect responses can be measured and tracked. Most often, the timings are one minute in duration. But shorter and longer periods are possible and useful for building speed and endurance. Such practice is to occur daily. And often times several practice sessions will occur each day. Naturally, the cards are to be shuffled after each timing. Otherwise the sequence of the cards could come to prompt the learner's answers.