The Effect of Number Talks on Number Senses' of Dyscalculic Middle School Students'

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the number talks in the development of number senses of the students with dyscalculia in middle school level. For this purpose we studied 15 students from 5th to 8th grades who were diagnosed with a specific learning disability by a provincial Guidance and Research Center (GRC) during the second semester of the 2016-2017 academic year. The design of the study is a single group pre-test post test semi-experimental design. The number talks examination was continued for a 3 week period of time. The data was gathered via "Number Sense Scale (NSS)" which was developed by Can (2017); "Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT)" which was developed by Fidan (2013) and "Tempo Test Rekenen (TTR)" which was developed by De Vos' (1992) and adapted into Turkish by Olkun, Can and Yeşilpınar (2013). To determine the grade level of MAT to be applied to the TTR students used, MAT was used to examine if students were experincing the difficulty of learning mathematics and NSS was used to investigate the effectiveness of number talks. According to the findings of the research, it was seen that the number talks statistically significantly affected the students' scores which were taken from the number sense scale. From this findings, it can be suggested that number talks can be used by teachers for the students who have difficulties in mathematics. This study has some limitations such as the size of the group and the period of the number talks applications so further studies can be done with much more students in a longer period of time.

Keywords

• diskalkuli, sayı duyusu, sayı konuşmaları