This strategy can be difficult for the students to master. For most of their mathematical lives, they have been taught to start at the beginning of a problem and carry the action through, on a step-by-step basis. The “Working Backwards” strategy, however, takes the opposite turn. The students begin with the end result of the problem, and carry the action backwards to find conditions at the beginning. The mathematical operations are reversed; so, for example, what was subtraction now becomes the inverse operation, namely, addition.