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

Alan Veliz-Cuba has received funding from the Simons Foundation and the American Mathematical Society for some of his research. You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an ...

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.

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, ...

Storytelling and mathematics don’t naturally go together. The best way to spark a discussion about a math topic in a classroom can be unpopular with many students: solving word problems. Word problems ...