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.

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.

Math word problems require literacy, math, and executive function skills from young children, so mastering them is key to later school success. Credit: Philip Keith for The Hechinger Report The ...

Word problems try and tell students a story about the math problem in front of them. They are a useful way to connect abstract numbers to concrete situations, so students can learn early on to apply ...

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 ...

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 ...