Development of Teaching Models for Effective Teaching of Number Sense in the Malaysian Primary Schools

The importance of teacher's knowledge in the teaching is well documented (Gess-Newsome, 1999; Graeber, 1999; Munby, Russell, & Martin, 2001). On the same note, teacher's knowledge and instructional practices into teaching number sense is also an important component to ensure that the students themselves develop number sense. The Malaysian National Education Blueprint 2006-2010 identified that improving the teaching profession is one of the important components of education excellence in Malaysia. Research have shown that teachers knowledge place a great influence on student's achievement (Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005). Since the last two decades, the efforts to provide accurate explanation on teacher's knowledge were given equal attention ranging from “what kind of knowledge need for teaching”, assessing knowledge base for teaching, or professional knowledge (Carlson, 1990) to practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985). Research on teachers teaching for number sense is being emphasized in many countries such as United Kingdom, Australia and United State (Askew et.al, 1997, Reys, 2006, Muirah, 2003). Working along that line, other researchers have also begun to undertake the difficult challenge of articulating the mathematical knowledge that teachers must draw upon when teaching for understanding (Bass, 2005; Heaton, 2000; Yackel, 2002). This paper reports on a research that aims to develop criterias for teacher's teaching and instructional practices that support and develop student's number sense. Data was collected through interview of primary school teachers, classroom observation of teacher's teaching and examination of other artifacts such as teacher's lesson plan, teaching aids, relevant resources used in teaching. All the classroom observations were videotaped for analysis. Data collection is still going on. However findings from initial data analysis from the pilot study indicate the emergence of certain aspects of teaching such as good teacher characteristics and effective student involvement. However, other aspects of teaching such as teacher's pedagogical content knowledge and connection of the mathematics to the content were observed as posing a challenge to the teachers.