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.

Want to learn more? Sign up for a free five-week email mini-course full of research-backed strategies to help students make sense of math. Give Cindy Cliche a math word problem, and she can tell you ...

Researchers tested a research-based intervention with English learners with math difficulty. The intervention proved to boost comprehension and help students synthesize and visualize information, ...

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 ...

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 ...