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.

Organizational strategies that help students break complex word problems into manageable chunks may be the key to solving them, according to a 2025 study.

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, ...

Want to learn more? Sign up for a free five-week email mini-course full of research-backed strategies to help students make sense of math. Give Cindy Cliche a math word problem, and she can tell you ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

In a recent study from our research group, we looked into how different characteristics of mathematical word problem-solving tasks may influence elementary schooler’s performance. Mathematical word ...

Segue Institute for Learning teacher Cassandra Santiago introduces a lesson on word problems to her first graders one spring afternoon. Credit: Phillip Keith for The Hechinger Report The Hechinger ...

You’ve no doubt seen some version of this viral math problem making the rounds on Facebook, Reddit or X (though we’ve given ...