Exploring the number sense of final year primary pre-service teachers

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explored the number sense of 47 final year primary school pre-service teachers in Namibiaand was motivated by the poor performance of Namibian primary school learners in both national andinternational standardised assessment tests. The literature review revealed that learner performance islinked to teacher subject knowledge (Ball, 1990, Ma, 1999) and that teachers' confidence in doing andteaching mathematics influences the way they teach and their willingness to learn mathematics (Ball,1990; Graven 2004). Number sense studies of pre-service teachers (Kaminski, 1997; Tsao, 2004;Veloo, 2010; Yang, Reys & Reys, 2009) have indicated that the development of number sense shouldbe a focus of primary pre-service teacher education.The data in this mixed method research design were obtained from a Number Sense Questionnaire, aWritten Computations Questionnaire and a Mental Calculations Questionnaire. These questionnaireswere adapted from instruments developed by Professor Der-Ching Yang for 6th and 8th grade learnersin Taiwan. Teacher confidence was measured by the McAnallen Confidence in Mathematics andMathematics Teaching Survey. Six randomly selected pre-service teachers were interviewed todetermine their use of number-sensible strategies.The correlation analysis shows a strong relationship between number sense and mental calculations;between number sense and confidence in both the ability to do and the ability to teach mathematics andbetween mental and written calculations.The overall results of this study reveal that the final year primary pre-service teachers demonstratelimited number sense and possess very few of the indicators of number sense that were described byKalchman, Moss and Case (2001). The findings expose a lack of conceptual understanding of thedomain numbers and operations, particularly in the domain of rational numbers and the operations ofmultiplication and division. The pre-service teachers have little or no access to a variety of flexiblenumber-sensible strategies to solve problems and calculate mentally. They lack the fluency in basicfacts and procedures to perform written calculations efficiently and correctly. Unexpectedly, theanalysis of the confidence survey shows that they are confident in both their ability to do mathematicsand their ability to teach mathematics.It is recommended that mental calculations and computational estimation should become a focus ofprimary school mathematics education. Institutions responsible for teacher training should develop thenumber sense of pre-service teachers and research effective and long-term professional developmentprogrammes. The confidence and willingness of the teachers to learn can be used as an importantresource.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University