You may have heard this complaint or even made it yourself: “These tests are more about reading than they are about math!”  Students are increasingly asked to understand and apply math to situations, rather than just perform an operation on numbers. This involves reading the math text that sets out the problem scenario.
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Middle school students often do well on straight calculations but feel lost when faced with more complex problems. And many tests these days require critical thinking and ask for an extended response. As in all test preparation, students need practice, especially on problems requiring more than one-step computation. Here are sites that offer test items […]

Problem solving, one of the NCTM Process Standards, is critical to learning mathematics. Students may feel confident with computation, measurement, and statistics, but they can feel completely lost when asked to apply those skills to a word problem. How to start? What to do next? This page offers an introduction to problem-solving strategies, followed by […]