Story problems can help young learners grasp math concepts, but teachers must design and scaffold them carefully.

Kevin Dykema, a math expert, shares strategies for teachers to help students tackle word problems.

For the study, researchers worked with 207 third grade students with and without math difficulties to see how working memory influenced their abilities to solve word problems.

Science Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong Teachers are trying new strategies that move away from focusing on ‘key words.’ Sarah Carr / The Hechinger Report ...

Word problems involve reading, executive functioning, problem solving, computation and vocabulary, which means there are a lot of ways for students to go wrong when trying to solve them.

To help struggling students, my colleague Sarah Carr wrote about how some teachers are mixing up the types of math word problems they use and zeroing in on the underlying structure of the problem.

Educational Studies in Mathematics, Vol. 81, No. 1 (September 2012), pp. 47-65 (19 pages) The present study aims to investigate the effects of a design experiment developed for third-grade students in ...

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 ...

Prodigy, a mathematics gaming company, recently made 120 examples of math word problems for students in grades 1-8 available to teachers at no cost.

Sometimes when children couldn’t do math problems on their own, teachers would try reading the problems aloud—and suddenly the kids could solve them. Apparently, those students could do the math.