Student-Athletes Has What It Takes to Build Number Sense

By Jay Trueheart

1. Educators can leverage the ability, mindset, grit, and confidence inherent in student-athletes to encourage greater participtation in STEM, particularly in Math.

2. Number Sense Ability has been defined as "...[having] the ability to use the understanding [about numbers and their operations] flexibly to develop a problem-solving strategy about the numbers" (Wulandari et al., 2021, p.1). Students with number sense [ability] prefer to develop computational strategies such as mental calculations, calculator techniques, and esitmations, and number sense plays a vital role to the acutalization of these strategies at various level (Maghfirah and Mahmudi, 2018, p.2). This is comparable to an athlete's physical ability to utilize when given a sport performance task.

3. In parallel to an athlete's physical ability, a math user's number sense ability and mental math can be imporved with practice.

4. An athlete's physical ability and mental toughness correlates well to a math user's number sense ability, mindset, and academic grit.

5. When educators notice that number sense abililty is low amongst math user, it is recommended to use additional number sense routine in their currirulum and instruction. A number sense routnie suggestion is a Number Talks activity that can be administered in the math classroom. Also, math teachers can utilize Berch's (2005) list of components of number sense in providing feedback and number sense anaylsis when evaluating and assessing students' mathematical learning. Lastly, Reys (1994) offered specific behavioral characteristics that can be used during assessing and evaluating a student's thinking.