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Why does my child think they know their tables when they don't?
A child who thinks "I know my sevens" often gets it wrong when asked a while later. Research explains why this happens, and why practising over several days prevents it.
What the research says
A randomised study in a UK secondary school, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, compared students who did all their maths practice in one session with students who spread it over three sessions across three weeks. A month later, everyone took a test.
There were two results. The first was expected: spaced practice led to much higher scores. The second gets less attention: students who learned it all in one go were far too confident. Right after their single session, they predicted scores much higher than they actually got. Students who practised in several sessions, by contrast, predicted their scores accurately, because they had experienced forgetting between sessions and knew where their gaps were.
This overconfidence has practical consequences. If a child (or a parent) believes a table is “done,” they stop practising it. The feeling of knowing after one long session is real, but it doesn’t last: it’s short-term memory, not lasting memory.
What this means in practice
The most reliable way to tell whether a fact is learned isn’t how sure your child feels, but how well and how quickly they remember it days later, asked at random, with no warm-up. Cramming gives a temporary confidence that feels permanent, and it’s the most common reason practice stops too soon.
Try this
- After a session, wait two days and then ask the same facts without warning. The difference between how it goes during the first session and how it goes two days later is the real measure of what they remember.
- If your child’s confidence and what they actually remember don’t match, they’ve probably practised in a single session instead of over several days.
- Don’t move on to the next table just because one session went well. Wait until it also goes well a few days later.
Sources
- Emeny, Hartwig & Rohrer (2021) — peer-reviewed study
Last reviewed: 2026-08-01