Is it better to practise times tables every day or in longer sessions?

The question of how to distribute practice time is one of the most practical and most consistently answered in educational research. The answer is clear, and it runs counter to how most people organise their children's study time.

What the research says

A study by Rea and Modigliani examining different practice frequencies specifically for times tables — using unfamiliar multiplication facts to isolate the effect of frequency from prior knowledge — found daily practice superior to every other schedule tested, including every other day and twice weekly, even when total practice minutes were equal. A 2025 meta-analysis of over 3,000 students across classroom settings confirmed the broader principle: distributed practice consistently outperforms massed practice, with an effect size of d=0.54.

The mechanism: memory consolidation benefits from distributed retrieval attempts. Each day’s practice builds on the previous day before forgetting has progressed far. Longer gaps require more time just to recover lost ground before new learning can occur.

What this means in practice

The practical implication is counterintuitive for many parents: doing less on any single day, but doing it every day, produces better outcomes than occasional longer sessions. Habit consistency matters more than session length.

Try this

• Aim for daily practice, even if some sessions are only 2–3 minutes.
• If a week is disrupted, resume the daily routine rather than scheduling a “catch-up” session.
• Measure success by streak consistency, not by minutes logged.

TabTabTab trains recall, not understanding. Building the concept of multiplication — arrays, repeated addition, commutativity — is classroom work, and it comes first.

Last reviewed: 2026-08-01