After years of assigning the kind of homework she had done as a student and observing students’ disengagement with it, a teacher overhauled how she assigns math practice.

Figuring out a word problem. Calculating area and perimeter. Finding the measure of an unknown angle. All these tasks, and more, draw on an essential foundation of math knowledge, said Brian Bushart, ...

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 ...