This study investigates how the approximate number system (ANS) and young children's symbolic skills jointly develop and interact. Specifically, the study aims at disentangling the directionality of the association between ANS acuity and a wide range of symbolic skills that reflect 4- to 5-year-olds' symbolic quantitative knowledge (enumeration…

In the September 2010 issue of "Mathematics Teaching," Tom O'Brien offered practical advice about how to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and contrasted his point of view with that of H.H. Wu. In this article, the author revisits Tom's examples, drawing on his methodology while, hopefully, simplifying it and giving it…

As a key concept in early mathematics curriculum, number sense is crucial for children's learning of other mathematics concepts. An earlier curriculum with a strong focus on number sense development presumably helps children perform better in mathematics later on. Chinese students outperformed their United States (U.S.) peers on number sense at…

The residue number system (RNS) has been an important research field in computer arithmetic for many decades, mainly because of its carry-free nature, which can provide high-performance computing architectures with superior delay specifications. Recently, research on RNS has found new directions that have resulted in the introduction of efficient…

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the number line can function in solving mathematical tasks by first graders (6 year olds). The main research question was whether the number line functioned as an auxiliary means or as an obstacle for these students. Through analysis of the 32 students' answers it appears that the number…

The goal of this study was to investigate understanding of inservice elementary school teachers in Taiwan about number sense, teaching strategies of number sense and the development of number sense of students; and the profile of integrating number sense into mathematical instruction , and teaching practice. Data was gathered through interviews of…

"Number sense" is "an intuition about numbers that is drawn from all varied meanings of number" (NCTM, 1989, p. 39). Students with number sense understand that numbers are representative of objects, magnitudes, relationships, and other attributes; that numbers can be operated on, compared, and used for communication. It is fundamental knowledge…