The investigation of primary school students' skill in place value

The main purpose of this study is to identify the errors with the term of place value that are made by 5th grader students, as well as understanding the term of place value and identifying using of the place value during mental processes.This research has been done with 72 students in 5 grade public school in Ministry of Education in Çukurova /Adana in 2010- 2011 academic year. In this research; as a tool to collect the data the student interview forms are used. The data from the students? responses to interview questions are collected with clinical interview method. With the data from the research, the students? ability of understanding of the place value and using of the place value during mental processes has been surveyed and in order to identify the sort of errors, the answer sheets are analyzed.The analyzes of the data obtained from the data collection tool has shown thatsuccess of the students? understanding the term of the place value and using of the place value during mental processes are low. As a result of the research it is determined that 5th grade students have some sort of mistakes that not to differentiate number of place from place value, not to understand connection of places, the difficulties in multiplying with 10 and operational mistakes with the the term of place value.