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.

Students who can't understand instructions for math problems face unnecessary barriers to achievement. Students who don’t read well or lack crucial vocabulary often face unnecessary obstacles—not just ...

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 problem ...

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 ...