Are you a math teacher?  Are you a parent of a child or teen who is taking a mathematics course?  If yes to either question, then I’m sure you’ve seen students struggle with word problems.  It’s so frustrating to watch and we want so badly to help them.

A perennial complaint of mathematics teachers is that students are unable to cope with word problems. This inability to deal with such problems often becomes a major stumbling block to success in mathematics courses (Nolan 1984). National trends in mathematics problem-solving, as measured by the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress, indicate that students, even 17-year-olds, have difficulty solving word problems (Dossey et al. 1988).

Read the rest of this entry »