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.

During a course in math teaching methods I took in ed school, I watched a video of a teacher leading his students to do a variety of tasks, ostensibly to teach them about factoring trinomials, such as ...

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 ...