to make word problems more approachable, said Kevin Dykema, the immediate past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and an 8th grade math teacher in Mattawan, Michigan.

Fundamental problems about multiplication — about, say, how numbers factor into primes — suddenly become much deeper and more challenging as soon as addition enters the picture. One of math’s biggest ...

How many kiwis does Oliver have? It’s the same math problem, right? And of course even a grade schooler would know that even a small kiwi is still a kiwi. But as it turns out, this extra data ...