What is a good time on a concentration grid?
It is the first question most students ask after their first grid: is my time good? The honest answer is that a good time is one that is better than your last one. Here is why, and how to make that comparison fair.
Why we don't publish a chart of times by age
You will find tables online that list a "normal" time for each age. We have not found one we trust enough to repeat, and even a good one would say little about a single student. Times depend on many things besides focus:
- the grid size and the numbering (00–99 or 1–25),
- screen or paper, and on a screen, whether it is a phone, a tablet, or a mouse on a laptop,
- whether wrong taps are allowed to slow you down or are ignored,
- how familiar the student is with the exercise, and how tired they are that day.
Change any of these and the time changes too, so a number from somewhere else is not a fair yardstick.
Measure against yourself
- Set a baseline. Have each student do one grid and write down the time. That is their starting point, whatever it is.
- Keep conditions the same. Same size, same kind of device or paper, ideally the same time of day.
- Repeat regularly. Once a week is enough to see a trend over a term.
- Look at the trend, not the last result. Times go up and down from day to day. A best time, or the average of the last few, says more than any single round.
The online grids do some of this for you: the history page lists every run on that device with the best time for each size. On paper, a simple record sheet with dates and times works just as well, and a line graph of it on graph paper makes a nice maths connection.
Sizes as starting points, not norms
These are suggestions to make the first attempt a good experience, not targets:
- Younger children: 10 numbers, or a 3×3 or 4×4 Schulte table.
- Most students: 25 numbers, or a 5×5 Schulte table.
- Older students and adults: 50 or 100 numbers.
Move up a size when a student's times stop improving and the grid starts to feel routine.
Sprints: a score instead of a time
In a sprint, students find as many numbers as they can in a fixed time, from 15 seconds to 2 minutes. Everyone finishes at the same moment, which is handy with a whole class, and the score (how many numbers found) is easy to compare with last week's.
Accuracy counts as well as speed. The online game records wrong taps for each run, so a student who slows down and makes fewer mistakes is also improving.