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Your child can multiply, divide and work with fractions. Then the homework says "Asha has 24 stickers, which is 6 more than Ravi has", and the answer comes back as 30. Word problems trip up children who are fine with plain sums, and they can trip up parents trying to help. This post explains why, using research on how good and weak solvers read problems, and gives you a short list of questions to ask instead of giving the answer.
Why do children find word problems so hard?
A word problem asks for two skills at once: understanding a short story and doing the maths. In a study of 891 Finnish fourth graders, Pongsakdi and colleagues (2019) found that word problem performance was strongly related to both text comprehension and arithmetic skill. On harder problems, children needed both. A study of 80 sixth graders taught with Realistic Mathematics Education by Boonen and colleagues (2016) found that even successful solvers did poorly on semantically complex problems, and argued that reading comprehension deserves a bigger place in maths teaching.
What do strong solvers do differently?
Hegarty, Mayer and Monk (1995) compared successful and unsuccessful solvers, partly by tracking their eye movements. Unsuccessful solvers tended to use a direct translation strategy: pick out the numbers and a keyword, then calculate. Successful solvers built a model of the situation described in the problem and planned from that.
The sticker problem shows the difference.
Direct translation: "24", "6", "more", so add. 24 + 6 = 30. Wrong.
Situation model: Asha has 24. Asha has 6 more than Ravi, so Ravi has fewer. Ravi has 24 − 6 = 18. Check: 18 + 6 = 24, which is Asha's number. Right.
This is why the common advice "more means add" causes errors. Keywords sometimes point the wrong way.
Six questions to ask instead of giving the answer
"What is the story about?" Ask for it in their own words, without numbers.
"What are we trying to find?" Get them to point to the question sentence and say what the answer will be, such as "a number of stickers" or "an amount in rupees".
"Can you draw it?" Bars, boxes or dots are fine. The drawing is the situation model.
"Who has more, and who has less?" For comparison problems, this one question prevents most direction errors.
"Roughly what should the answer be?" A quick estimate catches silly results.
"Does your answer make sense in the story?" Put the answer back into the words and check it.
Two more worked examples
A fraction problem with a bar model. "Meena spent 2/5 of her money on books and has ₹180 left. How much did she have?"
Draw a bar and split it into 5 equal parts. Shade 2 parts for books. The 3 unshaded parts are what is left.
3 parts = ₹180, so 1 part = ₹180 ÷ 3 = ₹60.
The whole bar is 5 parts: 5 × ₹60 = ₹300.
Check: 2/5 of ₹300 is ₹120 spent, and ₹300 − ₹120 = ₹180. Correct.
A common mistake is to find 2/5 of ₹180. The drawing shows why that is wrong: ₹180 is the part left, not the whole.
A division problem with a twist. "A school bus holds 42 students. How many buses are needed for 300 students?"
300 ÷ 42 is about 7.14, since 42 × 7 = 294 and 6 students are left over.
You cannot hire 0.14 of a bus, so the school needs 8 buses.
Children who answer "7.14" or "7" have done the division correctly but have not gone back to the story. Question 6 fixes this.
How you help matters as much as what you say
Your own feelings about maths affect your child. In a study of first and second graders, Maloney and colleagues (2015) found that when parents were more anxious about maths, their children learned less maths over the school year and became more anxious, but only when those parents helped with maths homework often. When anxious parents helped less often, there was no link.
So if maths makes you tense, you do not need to stop helping. Ask the questions above, which do not require you to know the method, and let your child do the explaining. Our post on helping with maths you have forgotten has more ideas. The four steps in Polya's How to Solve It are a good next stage for older children.
When you are both stuck
If neither of you can see the next step, a worked solution helps, as long as it shows the reasoning. The Fermi Problem Library has a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning rather than printing an answer, so your child can compare their drawing and plan with a full solution.
Tonight, pick one word problem from your child's homework and ask only questions 1 and 2 before they write any numbers.
