Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education. The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education.

Word problems are often described as “math stories” and can put complex mathematical operations into a more approachable form for students. But students often struggle when they see a combination of ...

Students who can't understand instructions for math problems face unnecessary barriers to achievement. Students who don’t read well or lack crucial vocabulary often face unnecessary obstacles—not just ...

Researchers tested a research-based intervention with English learners with math difficulty. The intervention proved to boost comprehension and help students synthesize and visualize information, ...

The authors conducted design or classroom experiments (R. Gersten, S. Baker, & J. W. Lloyd, 2000) at 2 sites (Pennsylvania and Florida) to test the effectiveness of schema-based instruction (SBI) ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 33, No. 5 (Nov., 2002), pp. 319-351 (33 pages) The study reported here investigated the arithmetical and algebraic problem-solving strategies and ...

A Missouri school district is now making its math curriculum more gender inclusive, updating word problems and other language-based math equations with "they/them" pronouns. As presented in a Webster ...