Tips for Solving Word Problems

With the new Common Core standards, word problems are becoming trickier and more common than ever. It's vital that you learn how to pull out the important information and figure out what the question is asking you to do even in the most complicated of word problems.

• If you have a worksheet, workbook, quiz, or test that you're allowed to write on, take full advantage of it. Use a combination of underlining, circling, and boxing in to separate the different parts of the word problem and highlight important information. Just make sure that you don't underline the entire thing. If you're going to do that, you may as well just leave it as is. The whole point of marking up the question is to find the important parts, so it's not going to help you if you mark everything as important. 
• Figure out what the question wants you to do. Sometimes, it'll ask you to do more than one thing and sometimes it'll try to confuse you by adding extra steps you need to do before arriving at your final answer. You can lose points fast if the question asks you to round your answer or convert it from feet to inches and you leave it as is. You might want to star the question so it'll stand out on your page. 
• Break it down into steps. Ask yourself what you need to do first. What comes after that? What's my third step, etc, etc? If you have enough time and you're really struggling with a problem, you might want to partially rewrite it and label each part so it's clearer to you. 
• Make sure you final answer is circled/underlined/boxed in/on the line provided. If you just did three computations to get at your answer, your test grader might not know which one is your final answer. 
• Check your work. Make sure you didn't make any silly errors, like adding instead of subtracting or writing a 9 instead of a 6. Also ask yourself if your answer makes sense in the real world. If the question asks you to find out how much Lily spent for three tomatoes and you get an answer of 90 dollars or two cents, you probably made a mistake somewhere. 
• You can also check your answer by working backwards. If you want to make sure you completed a division problem correctly, multiply the quotient (the answer you got) by the divisor (the number you divided by) to make sure you can arrive back at the original dividend (the number you divided, also known as the number under the little house in long division).