Number sense ability of junior high school students

Abstract

Number sense is a basis for learning mathematics. It can be interpreted as a person’s sensitivity about numbers and its operations with flexibility and intuition about numbers. If students have a good number sense ability, they will not encounter difficulty in solving number related problems. The fact is, number sense ability on various educational stage are still low. Students don’t have the sensitivity on the nature of the order of numbers. This study aims at classifying students’ number sense ability. So, in the near future, an effort to resolve the problem can be done. The subjects of this study were 80 ninth grade students of MTs NW Putra and Putri Narmada. The instrument that used in the study was 10 item number sense questions that were completed in 15 minutes. The result shows that the students’ number sense ability was at a low level with an average percentage of correct answers only 29.75%. Therefore, it can be inferred that the students are still weak in all components of number sense. The lowest skill is in the second component that is knowledge of facility with operations, with the result that the percentage of the number of correct answers is only 16.67%.