An investigation of 7th grade students' number sense strategies in mind games course

The aim of this study was to investigate the number sense strategies of 7th grade students in the mind games course in which games specific to the number and operations learning area and prepared considering the number sense components. In line with this purpose, the study was carried out with 7th grade students who took the course of mind games in a public school of Ankara. Since this study is aimed to reveal a certain situation in depth, the type of the study was determined as a case study from qualitative research design. The mind games was prepared according to the Ministry of National Education (MoNE, 2013) mind games curriculum and number sense components. These games are kendoku, kakuro, futoshiki and digital operation game from reasoning and operation games, match games from memory games. These games were applied for 6 weeks. During six weeks, number sense strategies that were used by students in mind games were observed. The data collection tools of the study consist of observation notes that were received by the researcher during the applications, video recordings, semi-structured interview questions and student solving papers. The data were analyzed by qualitative method for determining the number sense strategies used. As a result of the analysis, it has been observed that during the mind games course composing and decomposing of numbers, understanding effect of numbers on the operations and using the equivalent forms and representations of numbers from flexibility in the calculation number sense component, using one half as a benchmark from using reference points component, visual representation strategy from visuality component were used by students. The findings of the study show that the games in mind games course reveal different number sense strategies. Keywords: number sense, mind games, mathematics, 7th grade students, flexibility in the calculation, using reference points, visuality.