Solution strategies of a teacher candidate: rediscovering numbers in base eight

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.