Teaching Number Sense for 6th Graders in Taiwan

This study reports on two excerpts from a 6th grade Taiwanese class, describing how a teacher examined and promoted his students’ development of number sense. It illustrates an effort to integrate number sense activities into the mathematics curriculum in ways that encourage exploration, discussion, thinking and reasoning. The results indicate that number sense can be developed through well-designed number sense activities, effective teaching, and a good learning environment. It also demonstrates that students’ number sense and mathematical thinking can be promoted through the use of multiple representations.