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.

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 ...

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 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, ...