For pre-service teachers to develop early years learners’ number sense, they need to understand a range of non-standard calculation strategies. Mental mathematics plays a crucial role in number sense development, enabling learners to construct a broad repertoire of non-standard strategies that promote flexible, efficient and accurate calculation. Pre-service teachers need to understand a variety of efficient strategies for calculating and how to develop these with their learners. However, research in South Africa suggest that pre-service teachers are not adequately prepared to develop learners’ number sense. This paper explores South African 3rd year pre-service teachers’ understanding of the ‘rounding and adjusting’ calculation strategy. Shulman’s (1987) pedagogical content knowledge provides the framework for analysing pre-service teachers’ understanding of the strategies. A questionnaire given to the pre-service teachers seven weeks after the conclusion of their mathematical education course, and a pre-, post-, and delayed post-test were used to collect data. The results show that although the pre-service teachers' comprehension improved after the intervention and stayed mostly consistent after the seven weeks. When the ‘rounding and adjusting’ strategy was presented alongside other mental strategies, they had trouble recognising and explaining it. These findings imply that to improve their pedagogical content knowledge, pre-service teachers need to be given more opportunities to practice mental calculation strategies during their teacher education programmes.

Authors:
Lise Westaway, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Lise Westaway is an Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates. Her research interest is early years mathematics, particularly early number sense, mental mathematics and place value.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

Bookmark