Cracking the Code of Math Word Problems
Organizational strategies that help students break complex word problems into manageable chunks may be the key to solving them, according to a 2025 study.
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Go to My Saved Content.While math word problems are widely used in classrooms at all grade levels to help put numbers, operations, and equations into context and connect math to the real world, they also increase the cognitive load for students, who must parse the surrounding narrative text and distill the math. A 2025 study shows that not all the strategies students use for making sense of it are created equal.
After looking at over 1000 solutions that middle school students came up with for 3 different word problems, researchers found that the most commonly used strategy—highlighting the essential elements—only helped a little. But when paired with other organizational strategies, like pulling out key bits of information, sketching diagrams, and annotating with arrows or labels to help draw connections between parts of a problem, they were 29% more likely to solve the problem correctly.
Strategies like these work because many math word problems, even simple ones, offer more information than students’ working memories are able to hold. By transferring some of that data onto paper as they draw, annotate, and map out relationships, students free up more brain space for solving the math problem itself. A different study, also released in 2025, showed that the most capable problem-solvers were skilled at offloading the extra information from their working memory by writing it down, before reintegrating it as they translated and solved the problem.
For more brain-friendly strategies for math learners, read Youki Terada’s article for Edutopia, “7 Research-Backed Ways to Boost Working Memory in Math.”
To read the original research, check out the links below:
- Lisa-Marie Wienecke, Dominik Leiss, and Timo Ehmke’s research on note-taking strategies that help students master reality-based mathematical tasks (2025)
- Josh Medrano and Dana Miller-Cotto’s study on understanding working memory as a facilitator of math problem-solving and using offloading as a potential strategy (2025)
To learn more about 2025’s most compelling research findings for educators, visit “The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2025.”