The science
How much maths practice does a child need each day?
By Workings · · 6 min read
The short answer
There’s no research-backed number of minutes. What the research does support is how to practise: little and often rather than a lot at once, mixed rather than twenty of the same thing, recalled from memory rather than reread, and pitched so your child gets most questions right but not all of them. A short session most days, spread over weeks, beats a long one now and then.
Is there a right number of minutes?
No study can tell you that your child needs exactly 15 or 30 minutes. Children differ, and minutes are a poor measure of practice anyway: twenty minutes of the right questions is worth more than an hour of the wrong ones.
What the research does tell us is how practice should be arranged. Get that right and short sessions go a long way. Many families find 10 to 20 minutes most days is sustainable, and that sustainability matters more than any single session.
Why is little and often better than a lot at once?
Spreading practice out beats cramming it together. This is the spacing effect, one of the most reliable findings in learning research (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006). Each return to a skill, after a little forgetting, strengthens it more than another round straight away.
Sleep plays a part too. It helps move a newly practised skill into long-term memory (Diekelmann and Born, 2010). That’s why a skill that felt shaky on Monday can be easier on Tuesday, and why a short daily session does more than one long weekly one.
What should the practice look like?
- Recall, don’t reread. Answering a question from memory strengthens it far more than looking at a worked example again (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). Practice should mostly be doing, not reviewing.
- Mix it up. A sheet of twenty identical subtraction problems feels productive, but the method is chosen for you. Mixing problem types makes a child decide which method each problem needs, and mixed maths practice has beaten blocked practice in classroom studies (Rohrer and Taylor, 2007).
- Bring old skills back. Revisit things your child learned weeks ago, not just this week’s topic. Spaced retrieval practice is rated among the most useful learning techniques (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013).
How hard should practice be?
Hard enough that your child gets some wrong. Practice that feels easy often produces less lasting learning than practice with the right amount of difficulty, which researchers call desirable difficulties (Bjork and Bjork, 2011). One study of how learners improve suggests the most efficient training sits at about 85% success (Wilson and colleagues, 2019).
A rough guide for home: if your child gets every question right, it’s too easy and they’re rehearsing, not learning. If they’re getting fewer than about two in three, it’s too hard. Step back to something more familiar.
Should maths practice be timed?
Usually not, especially for a child who already worries about maths. Maths anxiety takes up the working memory that arithmetic needs (Ashcraft, 2002), and timed tasks are a common trigger. Fluency matters, but it grows from accurate, spaced practice. A clock adds pressure without adding learning.
How Workings does this
Practice in Workings takes about 20 minutes a day, and a parent can set anywhere from 10 to 30. Your child never sees a clock. Questions are pitched at a 70–85% chance of success, interleaved across strands, and mastered skills come back after 1, 3, 7, 16 and 35 days in new forms. Read the science behind the review schedule.
Questions
What if my child gets every question right?
Then the practice is too easy. Getting everything right feels good but teaches little. Move on to harder questions, or mix in older skills, until your child is getting most, but not all, of them right.
Is it better to practise every day or a few times a week?
Shorter and more often generally beats longer and less often, because spacing and sleep both help memory. But a routine your family can keep up matters more than the exact number of days. A few short sessions each week is far better than an ambitious plan that falls over.
References
- Ashcraft, M. H. (2002). Math anxiety: Personal, educational, and cognitive consequences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(5).
- Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3).
- Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2).
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1).
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3).
- Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35(6).
- Wilson, R. C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M., & Cohen, J. D. (2019). The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning. Nature Communications, 10.