This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Are thoughts more fundamental to our reality ...

The Hechinger Report covers one topic: education. Sign up for our newsletters to have stories delivered to your inbox. Consider becoming a member to support our nonprofit journalism. Students, parents ...

Nineteenth-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss used to joke that he could calculate before he could talk. Maybe it was no joke. Recent work casts doubt on the notion that language ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Across the country, parents are discovering that what their children bring home from school looks very little like what they once learned. It isn’t just math — reading lessons, writing expectations, ...

Students, parents and school principals all instinctively know that some teachers are better than others. Education researchers have spent decades trying — with mixed success — to calculate exactly ...