TITLE Daily Number Talks and the Development of Computational Strategies in Fourth Graders. PUB DATE 2003-07-00

A teacher in a large suburban elementary school in East Tennessee found that her fourth grade students had poor number sense and relied almost solely upon algorithmic procedure to solve math problems. Therefore, mental math was difficult for these students, so the daily number talks method was employed to strengthen number sense. However, no research could be found to validate the efficacy of daily number talks. The purpose of this study was to determine if daily number talks would increase the number of methods a student could produce to solve a given mental math problem or the number of addition problems a child could correctly answer in two minutes, and if there was any relationship between the two. A two-fold pretest was individually administered to a class of twenty-two fourth graders. Students were first shown a two-digit addition problem and asked to solve it. Next, the researcher asked each child to explain how he/she solved the problem, and this was recorded as one strategy. The researcher the