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

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.

Education professors have shown that a comprehension-based strategy can help English learners improve their math word-problem solving abilities. The approach boosts reading comprehension and problem ...

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 ...

Here's the thing about math that nobody tells you: it's less about memorizing formulas and more about knowing which tools to reach for. By fourteen, students should have a problem-solving toolkit that ...

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, ...

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 ...