On his website andertoons.com, illustrator Mark Anderson has a cartoon in which a boy is handing his teacher an assignment. “To show how well I understand fractions,” he says, “I only did half of my ...

Many children never master fractions. When asked whether 12/13 + 7/8 was closest to 1, 2, 19, or 21, only 24% of a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 US 8th graders answered ...

A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his ...

Over the past year, since I took over the common-core math beat, I’ve been thinking a lot about fractions. As I wrote in November, the Common Core State Standards for mathematics emphasize fractions ...

Want to learn more? Sign up for a free five-week email mini-course full of research-backed strategies to help students make sense of math. Fractions are an important building block in students’ ...

Important update, Jan. 17 at 18:00 UTC: There have been a lot of objections raised about the video mentioned below and the way I describe the math therein. It’s more than I can simply add or update ...