Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

A sharp rise in students without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators and policymakers.

Want to help your eighth-grader master math? Here are some of the skills your child will be learning in the classroom. Understand rational and irrational numbers. Know that a rational number can be ...