Barbie caught a lot of flack back in the ’90s for declaring, “Math class is tough!” Today we find ourselves in the disorienting position of defending her. We recently got a note from an anonymous ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don't know why it's true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...

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, ...

Elementary school students who learn to calculate using a mental abacus tend to perform better on math tests than their peers ...

Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

For kids ages 5 to 10 (grades K-4), the best math apps match the exact stage: Khan Academy IXL or DoodleMath for ...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238. “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a ...

Young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic, a new study finds. Researchers presented five- and six-year-old children with problems such as, ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...