Number sense: Rethinking arithmetic instruction for students with mathematical disabilities

We describe the concept of number sense, an analog as important to mathematics learning as phone-mic awareness has been to the reading research field. Understanding the concept of number sense and relevant research from cognitive science can help the research community pull together fragmented pieces of earlier knowledge to yield a much richer, more subtle, and more effective means of improv-ing instructional practice. This article demonstrates how the number sense concept can offer a useful framework for conceptualizing interventions that will significantly enhance mathematics instruction for students with mathematical disabilities. More than three decades have passed since Kirk and Bateman (1962) proposed that auditory processing was one of the psy-cholinguistic process deficits underlying specific learning disabilities. Although subsequent psychometric studies iden-tified the flaws in their conceptualization, our current under-standing of the importance of phonological processing and its contribution to reading development suggests that Kirk and Bateman were at least partly accurate in their analysis. In fact, the most notable advances in the learning disabilities field since the late 1970s have been in reading disabilities, a subtype of learning disabilities. More specifically, important advances have been realized in the prevention (e.g., Ball &amp