The headline finding from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress data is hard to ignore: while 9-year-olds are showing some signs of recovery, older elementary and middle school students, the 4th and 5th graders sitting in your classrooms right now, are still performing at levels that are significantly below where they were before the pandemic. With 2026 NAEP assessments running between January and March, the pressure on school leaders and teachers to show meaningful progress is real and it is building fast.
My honest take? The gap is not going to close through more worksheets or longer test-prep sessions. What I keep seeing, both in the research and in the early conversations we are having with schools, is that the children who are furthest behind are also the ones carrying the heaviest weight of math anxiety. You cannot drill fluency into a child who has already decided they are bad at maths. The intervention has to address the anxiety first.
Why NAEP Scores Stall for Older Elementary Students
When I looked into the pattern behind the NAEP data more carefully, something stood out. The partial recovery visible in younger children makes a certain kind of sense: 9-year-olds lost less instructional ground, their foundational number sense was still being built when schools closed, and they have had more time in a post-pandemic classroom to catch up. But for a child who was in 2nd or 3rd grade in 2020, the story is different. Those were the years when multiplication, division, and the conceptual links between operations were supposed to be cemented. That window was disrupted, and for many children, it never properly reopened.
The result is a cohort of 4th and 5th graders who are functionally operating one to two grade levels behind in number fluency, but are being asked to engage with fractions, ratios, and multi-step problems that depend on that fluency being automatic.
For a child without anxiety, that gap is uncomfortable. For a child with math anxiety, it is paralysing. Every new lesson becomes a reminder of what they do not know, and avoidance becomes the coping strategy. That is what traditional catch-up programmes are walking into, and it is why so many of them stall.
Why Traditional Math Interventions Are Falling Short
I want to be straightforward here, because I think some of the federally-funded intervention approaches being rushed into classrooms right now are well-intentioned but poorly matched to this specific group of learners. Timed tests, repetitive drill sheets, and rigid test-prep modules are the default tools, and they are precisely the things that make math anxiety worse, not better.
Research on math anxiety is consistent on this point. Timed assessments in particular trigger a stress response that literally impairs working memory, meaning that a child under time pressure will perform below their actual ability every single time. When that becomes the daily experience of a struggling 4th grader, the anxiety compounds. They stop trying. They start telling themselves a story about who they are as a learner, and that story is very hard to rewrite later.
From the schools we have spoken to, what teachers are asking for is something that meets anxious learners where they are, builds confidence incrementally, and actually gets kids to want to practise. That last part sounds obvious, but it is where most software falls down. Children do not engage with things that feel like tests in disguise.
What Actually Works: Engagement Before Drill
Here's what I am seeing in the approaches that do show promise for this cohort. The common thread is not the curriculum content, it is the emotional entry point. When a child is genuinely engaged, when they are playing rather than being assessed, the cognitive and emotional conditions for learning actually change. Anxiety lowers. Attention sharpens. Repetition stops feeling punishing.
Multiplayer game formats are particularly interesting in this context. When a child is competing with a friend or a classmate in a game they already enjoy, the focus shifts from "am I getting this right" to "I want to win this round." Multiplication facts get practised dozens of times inside a ten-minute session, not because the child is drilling them, but because the game requires it. The repetition is embedded in the fun.
This is the exact design principle at the heart of XTables Champions. Rather than building a new game from scratch and hoping children will adopt it, we wrap times-tables and maths fluency practice inside game formats that children already love. The multiplayer element is central, not an add-on, because we know that social engagement is one of the most reliable motivators for this age group.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We built this for the kids who put their heads down on the desk when the maths lesson starts. If we can get them to ask to play again tomorrow, we've done something real."
The SEND-friendly design matters enormously here too. A significant proportion of the students who are furthest behind in the NAEP data are children with neurodivergent needs or learning differences. Off-the-shelf software is rarely designed with those learners in mind. We are.
What Schools and Districts Should Be Doing Right Now
If you are a school leader or an elementary math specialist looking at your NAEP preparation window, here is my practical read on where to focus your energy.
Start by identifying the students in years 4 and 5 who are showing avoidance behaviours around maths, not just low scores. Those two things are related, but avoidance often precedes the visible score drop, and catching it early gives you more time to work with. Talk to your SENCO or specialist staff about which children might be experiencing genuine math anxiety rather than simply needing more practice time.
Next, audit the interventions already in place. Ask honestly: are these reducing anxiety, or are they replicating the conditions that produce it? If your current intervention involves more timed assessment and less genuine engagement, it may be making things worse for your most vulnerable learners.
Finally, look for tools that are built for engagement first. The fluency gains will follow when the anxiety barrier comes down. That is not a soft, feel-good argument. It is what the evidence on math anxiety consistently shows.
Let's Talk About Your Students
If you are a teacher, school leader, or SENCO working with 4th or 5th graders who are struggling with maths fluency and you are looking for something genuinely different to the drill-and-test cycle, I would love to hear from you. XTables Champions is designed exactly for the learners this NAEP data is describing, and we are actively speaking with schools who want to think carefully about how to support anxious and neurodivergent maths learners.
Head to xtableschampions.com or get in touch directly. Tell us about your students and what you have already tried. We are a young company, and every conversation genuinely shapes what we build next.