# EDUMATH: Generating Standards-aligned Educational Math Word Problems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06965/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [MAmmoTH: Building Math Generalist Models through Hybrid Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05653/) (2023)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [MathScale: Scaling Instruction Tuning for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02884/) (2024)
- [OpenMathInstruct-1: A 1.8 Million Math Instruction Tuning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10176/) (2024)
- [NumGLUE: A Suite of Fundamental yet Challenging Mathematical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05660/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Data (Almost) from Scratch: Generalized Instruction Tuning for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13064/) (2024)
- [Math Word Problem Generation with Mathematical Consistency and Problem Context Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04546/) (2021)
- [Learning by Analogy: Diverse Questions Generation in Math Word Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09064/) (2023)
- [A Theme-Rewriting Approach for Generating Algebra Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06210/) (2016)
- [MATHWELL: Generating Educational Math Word Problems Using Teacher Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15861/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Mathematics Teachers Interactions with a Multi-Agent System for Personalized Problem Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12066/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Math word problems (MWPs) are critical K-12 educational tools, and customizing them to students' interests and ability levels can enhance learning. However, teachers struggle to find time to customize MWPs for students given large class sizes and increasing burnout. We propose that LLMs can support math education by generating MWPs customized to student interests and math education standards. We use a joint human expert-LLM judge approach to evaluate over 11,000 MWPs generated by open and closed LLMs and develop the first teacher-annotated dataset for standards-aligned educational MWP generation. We show the value of our data by using it to train a 12B open model that matches the performance of larger and more capable open models. We also use our teacher-annotated data to train a text classifier that enables a 30B open LLM to outperform existing closed baselines without any training. Next, we show our models' MWPs are more similar to human-written MWPs than those from existing models. We conclude by conducting the first study of customized LLM-generated MWPs with grade school students, finding they perform similarly on our models' MWPs relative to human-written MWPs but consistently prefer our customized MWPs.