The child knows the answer, but needs more time: understanding processing speed in learning

Some children understand the explanation, know how to solve the activity and are able to arrive at the correct answer — but they need more time to do this.

This difference in rhythm can appear when copying from the board, responding orally, finishing a test, organizing a written production, performing calculations or following activities with many steps.

Needing more time does not, in itself, mean less intelligence, lack of attention or lack of knowledge. Processing speed is one of the dimensions involved in cognitive functioning and can interact with attention, working memory, visual perception, automation, language and motor response.

Therefore, perhaps the most important question is not:

“Why is this child so slow?”

But:

“What can she demonstrate when given enough time to think and respond?”

The daily routine and hasty interpretations

The teacher finishes writing on the board and announces: “You can keep the material.” One child is still halfway through the copy.

On the test, she knows the content, but leaves three questions blank because time is up.

During an oral activity, it takes a few seconds before responding. Another student anticipates and says what she would probably say.

At home, something similar happens. She knows how to do the task, but it seems to take much more time than the adults expected.

Then some hasty interpretations appear:

• “She is very slow.”
• “You need to try harder to do it faster.”
• “You don’t seem to be paying attention.”
• “If I really knew, I would respond immediately.”

But there is an important difference between not knowing an answer and need more time to process, organize and present it. It is in this difference that we find an essential concept for understanding certain learning situations: processing speed.

What is processing speed?

In a simplified way, processing speed refers to the efficiency with which a person can perceive certain information, perform relatively simple cognitive operations and produce a response.

However, it is important not to imagine the brain as a computer equipped with a single processor whose speed could be summarized by a number. There is no “general speedometer” of the brain.

Some tasks require quickness to locate symbols visually. Others involve word recognition, decision making, information retrieval or motor responses.

Gerst and collaborators (2021), when studying the structure of processing speed in children and its relationship with reading, compared different models and demonstrated that the way speed is measured and the characteristics of the tasks need to be considered when interpreting the results.

Therefore, when we notice that a child has a slower pace, we still need to ask: Slow to do exactly what? This question greatly changes the quality of the analysis.

Being slower doesn't mean being less intelligent

This is perhaps one of the most important distinctions in child development.

Imagine two children solving the same problem. The first responds in fifteen seconds. The second takes forty seconds. Both arrive at the correct answer and use appropriate reasoning. Who thought better?

With just this information, we don't know. Speed ​​is a characteristic of performance, but it cannot automatically be transformed into a measure of intelligence or ability to learn.

Forchelli and colleagues (2022), studying young people referred for clinical evaluation, showed that significant difficulties in processing speed may be related to academic functioning at different levels of general cognitive ability. This reinforces that processing speed and intelligence are not equivalent concepts.

At school, however, this difference can disappear in the rush of the classroom. The student who finishes first seems to know more. Someone who delays may appear insecure, inattentive or less prepared. And this does not always correspond to reality. Sometimes the child knows exactly what to do — he just needs more time to demonstrate what he knows.

School depends on speed more than we realize

Much of the school routine contains continuous temporal demands:

• Copy before the frame is erased;
• Respond before another student speaks;
• Solve a certain number of questions during class;
• Read within an established period;
• Make calculations quickly;
• Take notes while the teacher explains;
• Switch activities when the bell rings;
• Follow an instruction while organizing the material.

None of these tasks depend exclusively on knowledge. They also involve processing efficiency, automation, attention, working memory and execution.

In a longitudinal study that followed children from the first to the fifth grade, Geary (2011) analyzed factors related to the growth of mathematical performance, jointly considering numerical skills, intelligence, working memory and processing speed. The study precisely highlights the need to understand academic performance based on the interaction between different cognitive skills, and not a single variable.

Therefore, it would be reductionist to say “she does poorly because she is slow”. But it would also be inappropriate to ignore that the time needed to perform a task can interfere with the amount of knowledge that the child can demonstrate within school conditions.

The board copy example

Copying from the board seems like a very simple task, but note the complexity of the process:

The child looks at the board, finds where he left off, keeps some words temporarily in memory, shifts his gaze to the notebook, locates the correct line, writes it and then returns to the board. Then repeat the entire cycle.

A difficulty in any of these steps can significantly increase the time required. Therefore, a child who copies slowly does not necessarily have a global difficulty in processing speed. As we saw in the article about the child who erases and redoes everything, factors such as anxiety or excessive pursuit of graphic perfection can also interfere with the rhythm.

Studies with children with coordination difficulties also show that apparently cognitive measures of speed can be influenced by the motor demands of the task, reinforcing the importance of carefully interpreting the type of response requested (SUMNER et al., 2016). “It takes too long” describes a behavior; still does not explain its cause.

Processing speed and working memory

Imagine someone quickly provides four directions: “Take the book, open to page 28, copy the title and answer the first two questions.”

While processing the second information, the child needs to keep the first information available. Then comes the third. Then the fourth. When each step takes more time, working memory becomes more overloaded.

Mulder and collaborators (2010), studying children born prematurely, found direct relationships between processing speed, working memory and academic performance. The study clearly illustrates how these cognitive functions interact during learning.

As we highlighted in our article about executive functions and difficulty initiating tasks, when the pace of command presentation exceeds the child's immediate retention capacity, he or she may get lost along the way without this meaning a lack of interest or refusal.

In reading, accuracy and speed are also different

A child may correctly recognize words and still need more time to go through a text. Reading requires coordination between several processes: word recognition, access to meanings, maintenance of previous information and integration between different parts of the text.

Gerst and collaborators (2021) investigated different components of processing speed in children with reading difficulties and observed that they can be related to reading skills in different ways.

Here appears a fundamental connection with our previous article: a child can read correctly and understand little, while another may adequately understand what they read, but need more time to read. Outwardly, both may present low performance in a timed activity. The processes involved, however, are completely different.

And in mathematics?

Something similar happens in calculus. A child understands that 7 × 8 represents seven groups of eight and can correctly arrive at the result of 56 using counting strategies. Another immediately retrieves the result from memory.

Both have mathematical knowledge, but the second has greater automation of that arithmetic fact. When the activity involves many long operations, this difference has a major impact. The first child uses more time and cognitive resources to solve basic steps; when arriving at the main reasoning, enormous cognitive effort has already been made in the previous stages (GEARY, 2011).

This does not mean turning mathematics teaching into a speed competition. It means recognizing that automating basic skills frees up resources for more complex reasoning.

When the stopwatch starts measuring something else

Consider a child who gets 18 out of 20 questions correct when given enough time. In another test, with similar difficulty, he answers only 12 before the time runs out — and gets all 12 right. What did the second test measure? Knowledge, certainly. But also speed of execution.

And here we find a particularly important scientific caution.

Lovett, Harrison and Armstrong (2022) studied 447 students aged 10 to 14 with a previous diagnosis of learning difficulties. The researchers compared cognitive measures of processing speed with academic tasks performed under time limits in reading, math, and writing.

The relationships between the two types of measurement were often modest, showing a median correlation of just r = 0.25. The authors themselves concluded that Timed academic performance cannot be reliably estimated solely from results obtained on cognitive measures of processing speed (LOVETT; HARRISON; ARMSTRONG, 2022).

This is fundamental: a low score on a given measure of speed does not automatically mean that the child will be slow in all school tasks. Likewise, the difficulty in completing tests in the time available should not be automatically attributed to a single cognitive process.

Practical comparison: knowing how to do it vs. be able to do it in time

In pedagogical and psychopedagogical observation, comparing the same skill under different conditions provides valuable information. We can observe, for example:

• The child solves correctly when there is no strict time limit;
• Your written production improves when you don't need to finish quickly;
• Can explain orally what it took to record on paper;
• Understands the content, although often finishes after colleagues;
• Leave questions blank and can later answer them calmly;
• Copy slowly even when you understand the subject perfectly;
• There is a big difference between precision and speed;
• Demonstrates a clear drop in performance under time pressure;
• Feels anxious about timed activities.

What can the school and family do?

The first step is to discover the central objective of each activity. If we want to assess understanding, we need to ask whether speed is really part of the skill we want to measure.

This distinction prevents a secondary requirement from hiding the child's true capacity. Some practical strategies include:

• Waiting time: Allow a few additional seconds before calling another student to respond in class;
• Reducing extensive copying: Avoid copying from the board when copying is not the main objective of learning;
• Smaller blocks: Dividing long activities into short steps favors organization;
• Justifiable additional time: Offer extra time when the assessment requires reflection and not automation.

But extra time shouldn't be an automatic, generic response. As Lovett, Harrison, and Armstrong (2022) recommend, decisions about additional time should be supported by direct measures of relevant academic skills. If the main difficulty is in understanding, giving another twenty minutes will only mean twenty additional minutes faced with the same question.

The problem with just saying “do it faster”

say “do it faster” informs the desired result, but does not teach the path. Some children will try to speed up and make more mistakes; others will become anxious or abandon careful strategies.

There is in cognitive literature the phenomenon of trade-off between speed and accuracy: in many tasks, increasing speed can come at the expense of accuracy (HEITZ, 2014). Pressing for speed without support may simply trade a slower, correct response for a fast, inaccurate response.

Furthermore, there is the emotional risk of the child concluding that it takes time because “he is not intelligent”. This interpretation must be avoided at all costs.

The psychopedagogical perspective goes beyond the clock

When faced with a child who is slow, a psychopedagogical assessment investigates where the slowness appears: in visual tasks, in writing, reading, in calculation or in oral responses? Does it only occur under time pressure?

As we detail in the article Diagnosis is not a guess: the importance of scientific psychopedagogical assessment, the objective of the assessment is not to label or find a number that defines the child, but to understand the cognitive pattern that appears between different tasks and contexts.

Conclusion: the answer was already there

Children who need more time do not necessarily need a school with fewer challenges. She needs challenges presented in such a way that the demand for speed does not hide what she is capable of understanding.

Faced with that child who always finishes after the others, it is worth replacing the question “why does she take so long?” on the other:

“What happens when we give her enough time to show what she knows?”

Sometimes we discover something fundamental: the answer was already there. The timer ended early.

References

FORCHELLI, G. A. et al. What is a processing speed weakness? Importance of cognitive ability when defining processing speed in a child psychiatric population. Child Neuropsychology, v. 28, no. 6, p. 735–758, 2022. DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2021.1972957.

GEARY, D. C. Cognitive predictors of achievement growth in mathematics: a 5-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, v. 47, no. 6, p. 1539–1552, 2011. DOI: 10.1037/a0025510.

GERST, E. H. et al. The Structure of Processing Speed ​​in Children and Its Impact on Reading. Journal of Cognition and Development, v. 22, no. 1, p. 84–107, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2020.1862121.

HEITZ, R. P. The speed-accuracy tradeoff: history, physiology, methodology, and behavior. Frontiers in Neuroscience, v. 8, art. 150, 2014. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00150.

LOVETT, B.J.; HARRISON, A. G.; ARMSTRONG, I. T. Processing speed and timed academic skills in children with learning problems. Applied Neuropsychology: Child, v. 11, no. 3, p. 320–327, 2022. DOI: 10.1080/21622965.2020.1824119.

MULDER, H. et al. Processing speed and working memory underlie academic achievement in very preterm children. Archives of Disease in Childhood – Fetal and Neonatal Edition, v. 95, no. 4, p. F267–F272, 2010. DOI: 10.1136/adc.2009.169003.

SUMNER, E. et al. Examining the cognitive profile of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Child Neuropsychology, v. 22, no. 8, p. 961–980, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2014.992401.