Schulte Table: What It Is, How to Do It and What It Trains

A Schulte table is a square grid, classically five by five, filled with the numbers 1 to 25 in random order. You find the numbers in ascending sequence as fast as you can, and the time you take is your score. Psychologists use it as a quick measure of attention and visual search. Speed-reading courses use it as an exercise, with one extra rule: keep your eyes on the centre of the grid and find each number without looking at it directly.

It takes under a minute, needs no instructions beyond the ones above, and gives you a number you can try to beat. That is most of its appeal. What it does for your reading is a separate question, and the answer is more modest than most Schulte table pages admit.

Where does the Schulte table come from?

The table carries the name of Walter Schulte (1910–1972), a German psychiatrist who directed the university psychiatric clinic in Tübingen from 1962 until his death. Reference works and training sites consistently describe it as a psychodiagnostic test of attention that he devised. That attribution is worth holding a little loosely: it is repeated everywhere, but we could not trace it to an original publication by Schulte, and his standard German biography does not mention the table at all.

What is well documented is how the table is used today. It appears in peer-reviewed research as a compact attention task, often alongside better-known tests:

• Biernacki and colleagues (2013) used Schulte tables to measure attention switching in pilot cadets before and after time in a centrifuge.
• Lai and colleagues (2023) used a 25-square Schulte grid, together with the trail-making and digit-span tests, to track swimmers' cognitive function before and after an all-out 1,500 m race. Scores were worse after the race.
• Khramova and colleagues (2021) recorded brain activity in children and adults while they worked through 5×5 tables, and describe the task as a simplified relative of the German Zahlen-Verbindungs-Test, a number-connecting test.

The pattern across these studies is that the table is treated as a sensitive, quick readout of how well someone is concentrating right now. It is slower when you are tired or distracted, which is exactly what makes it useful as a test.

How do you do a Schulte table correctly?

There are two ways to do it, and they are different tasks. In most research the person simply searches the grid freely and points to each number. In the training version, described by Lu and colleagues (2022), you fix your gaze on the centre and use the edges of your vision to find the numbers. If your aim is practice rather than a test score, use the second version:

1. Sit at your normal reading distance, with the whole grid visible without turning your head.
2. Rest your eyes on the centre of the grid. On a 3×3 or 5×5 grid that is the middle cell; on a 4×4 grid it is the point where the four middle cells meet.
3. Without moving your eyes, look for 1. When you have it, tap it and bring your attention back to the centre.
4. Carry on in order: 2, 3, 4 and so on to the last number.
5. If a number will not appear after a second or two, allow yourself one glance, then return to the centre. A strict no-movement rule on a large grid is frustrating, not virtuous.
6. Put accuracy before speed. A wrong tap means you guessed, and guessing is not the skill you are practising.

Two common mistakes undo the exercise. The first is sweeping the grid row by row like a page of text, which turns it into an ordinary search task. The second is memorising: on a single grid you quickly learn where the next few numbers are, so always start a fresh shuffle rather than repeating the same one.

Nothing checks where your eyes are. The centre-fixation rule is one you enforce yourself, and a slower time with still eyes is better practice than a fast time with darting ones.

Which grid size should you use?

The 5×5 grid is the standard format in the research literature. Smaller grids are easier versions of the same task, useful for learning the fixation rule before the outer cells get too far from the centre to read.

What is a good Schulte table time?

There is no reliable public norm. Websites quote confident benchmarks, such as "under 30 seconds is good" for a 5×5 grid, but the figures differ from site to site and none of those we checked cites a study.

The one sourced figure we can offer comes from the Khramova study mentioned above. Ten adults aged 18 to 20, new to the task, took an average of 37.7 seconds per 5×5 table (standard deviation 12.8 seconds), and ten children aged 7 to 8 took 72.3 seconds. Treat this as a rough reference point and no more: the groups were small, the participants searched freely with a stylus on a tablet, and they counted down from 25 to 1, which is harder than counting up.

Your time also depends on things that have nothing to do with attention: the size of the grid on your screen, whether you tap or click, and whether you hold your gaze still. The only comparison that means much is you against yourself, on the same device, with the same rule.

Does the Schulte table improve reading speed or peripheral vision?

You will get faster at Schulte tables. That much is certain, and it happens quickly. Whether the gain carries over to reading is another matter, and we found no controlled study showing that it does.

The usual claim is that the drill widens the area you can read in one glance, so you need fewer eye stops per line. The research on reading points the other way. The amount of text you take in per fixation, the perceptual span, appears to be set by attention and language processing rather than by how well you see off-centre. When Miellet, O'Donnell and Sereno (2009) enlarged the text away from the point of gaze to cancel out the loss of sharpness, readers still did not take in more of it. And the major review of speed reading by Rayner and colleagues (2016) concludes that reading speed is limited mainly by language skill, with a trade-off between speed and understanding. Peripheral vision training for reading covers that evidence in detail.

What the table can reasonably do for you:

• Give you a one-minute exercise in sustained, deliberate attention, with instant feedback.
• Act as a rough check on your state. If today's time is well off your usual, you are probably tired or distracted, and a demanding text may go badly too.
• Mark the start of a reading session, much as eye warm-up exercises do.

What it does not do is correct eyesight, enlarge your visual field or treat an attention disorder. If you want to read faster, the habits in how to read faster will repay your time better, and does speed reading work? sets out what the evidence supports.

A Schulte table practice plan

Keep it short. The table is a warm-up, and the value of a warm-up lies in what you do after it.

1. Days 1 to 3: three 3×3 grids a day, eyes fixed on the centre cell. The aim is to finish without moving your eyes at all.
2. From day 4: two or three 4×4 grids a day, about one to two minutes in total. Allow a glance only when you are truly stuck.
3. Move up to 5×5 when you can finish a 4×4 grid with no wrong taps and without sweeping your eyes. Drop back a size on days when the centre rule falls apart.
4. Stop at three grids. Your time on later grids mostly reflects fatigue, and more repetitions buy little.
5. Then read. Spend the next five to ten minutes on real text, which is the practice that the research does support.

Tachi times each run, counts wrong taps and keeps your best time for each grid size in your browser, so you can see your own trend without an account. The full ten-minute routine, including where the Schulte table sits in it, is on the How Tachi works page, and the terms used here are defined in the glossary.