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

A class has 29 students. Twenty students have dogs; 15 have cats. How many have both dogs and cats? Speaker Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, posed the ...

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.

PEMDAS has plagued many in elementary school math classes, but how many Americans remember how to use the acronym to solve problems? A simple sixth-grade math equation went viral on X for stumping ...

In Central Falls, R.I., teachers are trying new strategies that move away from focusing on “key words,” the traditional, simplistic approach that often leads younger students astray CENTRAL FALLS, R.I ...

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.

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 ...