All Kinds of Stories
Every kind of story problem, and how to tell them apart.
For grown-ups
- How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Recognising the structure of a word problem — join, separate, part-whole or compare — and solving it whichever part is missing.
The single highest-value gap the research identified. WWC Recommendation 5 — teach the structure of word problems — is rated STRONG on 18 studies, and arithmetic fluency transfers to word problems only weakly (g=0.25), so this cannot be left to fall out of fact practice. Follows Illustrative Mathematics grade 1 unit 2, which devotes one section to each structure, and moves the unknown so the same structure is met in its easy and its hard form.
- The underlying idea
- Four structures cover almost every one-step story problem. A child who knows the structures can solve a problem whose wording they have never seen; a child who hunts for keywords cannot.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- 1st grade Unit 2: Addition and Subtraction Story Problems
- Sources
- Institute of Education Sciences / What Works Clearinghouse (2021) · Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · van der Kleij et al. (2015) all references →
Related measured skills: ALPACA · Early operations, ARF · Addition facts, ARF · Subtraction facts. What this means