Prospective Preschool Teachers' Ideas for Developing the Number Sense of Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reveal the ideas of prospective preschool teachers about developing the number sense of children by using four different types of relationships defined by Van de Walle (2004). Fifty prospective teacher's ideas about developing the number sense of children were collected by the open-ended questions. In addition to these data, four prospective teachers, who were considered to ensure the maximum variety, were interviewed for data collection. According to the findings; majority of the participants stated that developing the number sense of children requires mainly “concretizing the number” and “recognizing/writing/reading the numeral”. There is scarcely any participant answer which includes “using the relationships between numbers” for developing the number sense of children