Story problems can help young learners grasp math concepts, but teachers must design and scaffold them carefully.

GPT-4, for instance, achieved the 89th percentile on the SAT, while Google’s PaLM 2 surpassed GPT-4 in math assessments, including over 20,000 school-level problems and word puzzles.

Word problems try and tell students a story about the math problem in front of them. They are a useful way to connect abstract numbers to concrete situations, so students can learn early on to ...