The analysis of the secondary school students' number sense according to different components

Number sense has taken place in studies related to the mathematic education for about thirty years. Number sense is particularly described as understanding numbers and operations and making out the relationship between them though reserchers don't agree on number sense description completely. The person with high sense of number use suitable methods more easily and practical. In this study, it was aimed to examine the number sense of middle school students in terms of different variables. The study sample consists of 420 students in different types of schools (secondary school, İmam Hatip secondary school and private secondary school) in West Black Sea Region. The study is specified as scanning in quantity methods. The study test has twenty questions with nine questions for using the numbers effectively, seven questions for using the operations effectively and four questions for using the mathematical computation skill. In each question given a score in number sense test, scoring aimed at number sense solution (NSS) is 2 points, scoring for solutions based on rules (RBS) is 1 point and wrong answer (WA) is zero The raw score has been turned into Rasch scores by the use of Winsteps ware and used in statistical analysis.The statistical analysis is made by the use of WINSTEPS 3.72 modelling programme and SPSS 22 package programme. In descriptive analysis frequency, percentage of data, arithmetical average and standard deviation. T-test and one way variance analysis (ANOVA) has been used to state the relationship the number sense in a kind of school, gender and class levels. Findings show that there is a meaningful difference in secondary school students' number sense according to different kind of schools. This difference has taken place private secondary school -secondary school and private secondary school- Imam Hatip secondary school. There isn't a significant difference in gender factor but there is a meaningful difference according to the class levels grade 5 - grade 6, grade 5 - grade 7 and grade 5 - grade 8. According to number sense components, using the numbers effectively is the most succesful component in secondary school students on the other side the weakest one is using the operations effectively.