Journal of the Mathematics Council of the Alberta Teachers’ Association
Volume 32 Issue 3, August 1995
7 – 9
Exploring Products Through Counting Digits: Equal Factors
W. George Cathcart
The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 1989, 39) definesnumber sense as “an intuition about numbers that is drawn from all the varied meanings of number.” Five components of number sense are listed, two of which are relevant to this article. Children with good number sense “recognize the relative magnitudes of numbers” and they “know the relative effect of operating on numbers” (NCTM 1989, 38). Furthermore, “students with number sense pay attention to the meaning of numbers and operations and make realistic estimates of the results of computation” (NCTM 1992, 10).
