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 ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

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, ...

An AP Statistics teacher decided to ask his students what they wanted to learn about. The results are a curriculum that makes math feel relevant to students' interests. In a high-poverty school in San ...

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.