Number sense and mental computation among secondary students' in Selangor / Parmjit Singh, Rosmawati Abdul Halim and Rusyah Abdul Ghani

The purpose of this research was to assess students understanding of number
sense and mental computation among Form One, Form Two, Form Three and
Form Four students. A total of 1756 students, ages ranging from /2 to 17
years, from thirteen schools in Selangor participated in this study. A majority
(74.9%) of these students obtained an A grade for their respective year-end
school examinations. The design for this study was quantitative in nature
where the data on students sense of numbers was collected using two
instruments, namely, Number Sense Test and Mental Computation Test. Each
of these instruments consisted of 50 and 45 items respectively. The results from
this study indicate that students were not able to cope to the Number Sense
Test as compared to the Mental Computation Test. The former unveils a low
percentage of 37.3% to 47.7% as compared to the latter of 79% to 88.6%
across the levels. In the number Sense Test, surprisingly. there was no significant
difference in the results between Form 1 students and Form 2 students and
also between Form 3 students and Form 4 students. This seems to indicate
that as the number of years in schools increase, there is an increasing reliance
on algorithm and procedures. Although in the literature it has been argued
that including mental computation in a mathematics curriculum promotes
number sense (Mcintosh et. al., J997; Reys, Reys, Nohda, & Emori, J995), this
was not the case in this study. It seems that an over reliance on paper and
pencil computation at the expense of intuitive understanding of numbers is
taking place among these students.