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.

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 ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Hi, I'm Miss James. Thank you so much for being here today with me. For this lesson, all you will need ...

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 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 ...

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, ...