What’s seven times nine? Quick, you’ve got six seconds to answer. This June, over 600,000 children in England in year four, aged eight and nine, will be expected to answer questions like this. They ...

Young students around the world struggle to memorize multiplication tables, but the effort pays off. Cognitive scientists say that learning 6 x 7 and 8 x 9 by heart frees up the brain’s working memory ...