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.

A new study from the University of Kansas explores the role of working memory in word problem-solving for students with and without math difficulties. Researchers found that using interventions to ...

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.

A member of our research community, Terhi Vessonen and her co-authors, looked into how different characteristics of mathematical word problem-solving tasks may influence elementary schooler’s ...

Let’s pretend you’re back in math class. You might need to figure out answers to the following questions: If your doctor gave you three pills and told you to take one every half hour, how long would ...

Solving word problems is a key component of math curriculum in primary schools. One must have acquired basic language skills to make sense of word problems. So why do children still find certain 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 ...