Why Most Maths Apps Fail Anxious Kids | Times Tables App

When I worked through the Liu, Peng and Li meta-analysis, the headline result was striking but the detail underneath it was even more interesting. The researchers were not just comparing "good app" versus "bad app". They were comparing whole categories of intervention. Skills-only programmes, the kind that drill multiplication facts and then move on, showed modest gains in procedural fluency. But they did almost nothing for the anxiety that was blocking children from accessing those skills in the first place. Children who received both skill-building and targeted anxiety support, by contrast, showed meaningful improvements on both dimensions.

What stood out to me reading this was how clearly it reframes the problem. Maths anxiety is not a side effect of being weak at maths. For many children, the anxiety comes first. It narrows what cognitive scientists call working memory capacity, making the child less able to perform even tasks they have technically learned. A timed drill that a confident child breezes through can, for an anxious child, produce exactly the kind of stress response that entrenches avoidance. The research is blunt about this: if an intervention ignores the emotional side of a child's relationship with numbers, it is solving half a problem at best.

Here is what I keep seeing as I look at the maths EdTech market. The vast majority of apps are built around a content-delivery model. More questions, more levels, more badges. The implicit assumption is that low attainment equals low exposure, so more exposure will fix it. For some children, that is true. For children with maths anxiety, it can actually make things worse, because piling on more drill without addressing the fear just associates numbers with more stress.

The 2026 meta-analysis is particularly sharp on timed tests, which are still ubiquitous in primary maths software. For children who already feel threatened by maths, time pressure activates a threat response rather than a challenge response. Performance drops. The child concludes, again, that they cannot do it. The cycle tightens.

This is not new intuition, but having it confirmed across 51 studies and thousands of real children is a different kind of evidence. It should be making district technology buyers and school leaders ask much harder questions about what the tools on their approved lists are actually doing for their most vulnerable learners.

The research describes combined intervention in terms of components, but I think it is worth being concrete about what that means for a real child.

It means the learning environment itself needs to feel safe before skill practice begins. It means pacing that responds to how a child is doing emotionally, not just whether they got the answer right. It means framing progress in a way that builds self-belief gradually, not just measures performance repeatedly. And it means that when a child gets something wrong, the response from the programme needs to encourage, not just record a miss and move on.

None of that is incompatible with genuine fluency-building. The point of the meta-analysis is precisely that the two things work together. A child who feels calmer and more confident is a child whose working memory is freer to actually learn and retain the maths. The emotional support is not a soft add-on. It is a performance enhancer for the cognitive work.

At XTables Champions, this research lands close to home. From the schools and families we speak to in our early work, the most common thing we hear is not "my child doesn't know their times tables". It is "my child shuts down when we try to practice them". Those are different problems, and they need a different kind of solution.

We have built XTables Champions specifically around the idea that fluency and confidence have to grow together. The programme is designed to reduce the threat of getting something wrong, to pace practice in a way that feels achievable rather than pressurised, and to give children repeated small wins that build genuine belief in themselves as maths learners. The July 2026 findings give us real confidence that this direction is the right one.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We kept hearing from parents that their children already knew the anxiety wasn't helping them, but couldn't switch it off. That told us the app had to work on both things at once, or it wasn't really working at all."

We are a young company and we are honest about that. But the schools and parents we are working with early on are telling us something consistent: when children feel safe in the practice environment, they stay in it longer, they come back to it willingly, and the fluency follows.

If you are a teacher, SENCO or parent looking at maths tools in light of this research, here are the questions I would be asking of any programme.

First: does it treat anxiety as a real variable, or does it just track right and wrong answers? Second: how does it respond when a child struggles, and does that response help them re-engage or does it simply log the failure? Third: does it use time pressure, and if so, does it give anxious learners a way to build confidence before introducing it? Fourth: what is the evidence base the product team is working from, and is it current?

These are not trick questions. A good product should have clear answers to all of them.

If the Liu, Peng and Li findings resonate with what you are seeing in your classroom or at home, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Whether you are a parent whose child dreads times tables practice, a teacher looking for something that works for your most anxious learners, or a school leader thinking about what evidence-based maths fluency looks like in practice, XTables Champions was built for exactly these conversations.

Get in touch with us at xtableschampions.com and tell us about your learners. We are at an early, founder-led stage, which means you will actually speak to people who care deeply about getting this right. No hard sell. Just a real conversation about what anxious maths learners need, and how we can help.