Can a short daily app session really replace traditional drilling?

Apps and digital tools for times tables are often dismissed as games — less rigorous than worksheets or verbal drilling. A growing body of research suggests that the format matters far less than the principles built into it.

What the research says

A UK game-based training study with 7–8 year olds reported a moderate effect (d ≈ 0.6) from short daily sessions using spaced repetition and immediate feedback. Effect sizes of this size are common in well-designed fluency interventions; the important point is not the exact number, but that the mechanisms — retrieval, spacing, immediate correction — are what drive the gain, not the length of the session.

Note that studies of this kind typically use longer sessions than TabTabTab’s three minutes — this one used 20-minute daily sessions. The evidence supports the mechanisms; the session length in TabTabTab is a deliberate trade-off in favor of daily consistency, which the distributed-practice literature supports independently.

What this means in practice

Short, structured digital sessions are not a lesser substitute for “real” practice — they can be more effective, provided they incorporate the mechanisms that the research identifies: retrieval, spacing, interleaving, and immediate correction. The format is less important than whether these principles are present.

Try this

• Evaluate any app or digital tool by whether it uses active retrieval (not just multiple choice), mixed questions, and immediate feedback — not by how engaging it looks.
• 5 minutes of high-quality retrieval practice is more effective than 20 minutes of passive exposure or worksheet completion.
• If an app shows your child the answer before asking them to recall it, it’s not retrieval practice — it’s exposure. The sequence matters.

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