To learn math, students must build a mental toolbox of facts and procedures needed for different problems. But students who can recall these foundational facts in isolation often struggle to use them ...

From classrooms to kitchen tables, debates about math education are never far away. Should teachers drill multiplication facts or encourage creative strategies to solve problems? The answer, ...

Mathematicians excel at handling complexity and uncertainty. Mathematical reasoning strategies aren't just useful for dilemmas involving numbers. We can apply math mindsets to improve our approach to ...

Imagine you are a mountaineer. Nothing excites you more than testing your skill, strength and resilience against some of the most extreme environments on the planet, and now you've decided to take on ...

Solving arithmetic problems, even simple subtractions, involves mental representations whose influence remains to be clarified. Visualizing these representations would enable us to better understand ...

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, ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...