Abstract:
Up to today, many of the studies mostly investigated students' understanding of
natural numbers rather than preservice teachers’. This study conducts a case study in
order to investigate a preservice teacher's understanding of natural numbers and
operations on them. The preservice teachers, who were enrolled in a senior year
course in an elementary mathematics education department, used materials for
natural numbers that aimed to teach the concepts and operations using base eight
instead of customarily used base ten for a period. This way, preservice teachers had
a chance to develop different strategies for the operations that they memorized in
base ten and their thinking ways are investigated during the solution of operations.
The results reveal that using different base supports preservice teachers to change
their thinking style and interpret the problems from a different perspective without
doing any memorization.
