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.

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.

Math word problems require literacy, math, and executive function skills from young children, so mastering them is key to later school success. Credit: Philip Keith for The Hechinger Report The ...

A dad in Virginia ended up turning to social media for help after becoming confused by a first-grade math problem. Math seems to be a problem for many young Americans. In 2022, the Programme for ...

Key Takeaways ・UCSD has seen a dramatic increase in freshmen needing remedial math, rising from 1 in 100 to 1 in 8, ...

In DeKalb County, Ala., elementary school math classes have gotten noisy. In a good way. Instead of worksheets and textbooks, children practice adding and subtracting with tiny toy bears. They ...