The Study of Primary School Teachers’ Performance on Number Sense

To examine the number sense strategies used by elementary school teachers, six elementary school teachers were interviewed by semi-structured interview method. Over one-third of the responses used rule-based methods and about 12% of participants' responses were deemed incorrect. About a half of the teachers' responses showed evidence of the use of number sense. In addition, the teacher with background in mathematics education outperformed the teachers with background in Chinese Literature Education and Sociology. Therefore, a question of utmost importance for future teacher professional development is how to help elementary school teachers develop a profound understanding of number sense.