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.

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 ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...