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.

Word problems try and tell students a story about the math problem in front of them. They are a useful way to connect abstract numbers to concrete situations, so students can learn early on to apply ...

Key points Word problems that can be solved by the same arithmetic operation have varying difficulty. Problems that involve the inverse relation between addition and subtraction are more challenging.

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 ...

Solving word problems is a key component of math curriculum in primary schools. One must have acquired basic language skills to make sense of word problems. So why do children still find certain word ...