Is this down to how students are taught to calculate their tables – or because of the sequence patterns are less memorable? The numbers furthest away from 5 and 10 (7,8,12) are also the most difficult.

It would be interesting to see the gender breakdown to see whether boys and girls have any differences in which multiplication they find difficult.Īs you might expect, overall the 12 times table was found most difficult – closely followed by 8. having to answer against a clock) may well have encouraged this attitude. Girls, by contrast, got substantially fewer wrong, at 22%, but took 4.6 seconds on average to answer.Īnother interesting statistic – boys were more reckless and less considered with their answers! The element of competition (ie.

On average, boys got 32% of answers wrong, and took 4.2 seconds to answer each question. You might have expected the most difficult multiplications to also take the longest time – however it looks as though some questions, whilst not intuitive can be worked out through mental methods (eg doing 12×9 by doing 12×10 then subtracting 12.) It’s quite interesting to see that this data is somewhat different to the previous graph. Maybe unsurprisingly, 1×1 got answered the quickest (but perhaps illustrating the hazards of speed, pupils got it wrong about 10% of the time), at 2.4 seconds on average – while it was 12×9 which made them think for longest, at an average of 7.9 seconds apiece. Which times table multiplication did students take the longest time to answer? It’s interesting to see that the difficult multiplications cluster in the middle – perhaps due to how students anchor from either 5 or 10 – so numbers away from both these anchors are more difficult. The colours then change through lighter shades of blue, then from lighter reds to darker reds. The graphic shows the questions that were answered correctly the greatest percentage of times as dark blue (eg 1×12 was answered 95% correctly). This was closely followed by 8×6, then 11×12, 12×8 and 8×12. The hardest multiplication was six times eight, which students got wrong 63% of the time (about two times out of three).

Which multiplication did students get wrong most often? Edited highlights (Guardian quotes in italics): There’s an excellent article on today’s Guardian Datablog looking at a computer based study (with 232 primary school students) on which times tables students find easiest and difficult.

Which Times Tables do Students Find Difficult?

8 times tables up to 12