Assessing The Number Sense of Community College Developmental Mathematics Students

Students who enter community colleges unprepared for college-level mathematics often
struggle to complete a college credential. To address this problem, college leaders and
policymakers have employed various interventions that alter the structure of how underprepared
students progress through their mathematics courses. For many students, this change to structure
may simply shift, mask, or ignore the problem that they lack a strong foundation of mathematical
understanding. This study approaches the problem by exploring what it means to effectively
build mathematical knowledge upon a solid foundation. Specifically, this quantitative
dissertation investigates the number sense of community college developmental mathematics
students, how their number sense may improve throughout a typical developmental course, and if
there is a relationship between their number sense and their success in that course.
A total of 165 students enrolled in developmental courses at Muskegon Community
College in the fall of 2021 participated in the study. The students’ number sense was measured
using a 37-question multiple-choice number sense assessment. The assessment was administered
as a pretest at the beginning of the semester and as a posttest at the end of the semester. Students’
final course grades were acquired from the college’s student records database. The data were
analyzed using descriptive statistics, a one-way ANOVA test, paired samples t tests, and a
Spearman correlation.
The findings of the study suggest that community college developmental mathematics
students have poor number sense, there is a difference between the number sense of students
enrolled in different developmental mathematics courses, students’ number sense improves while completing some developmental mathematics courses but not others, and greater number sense is
correlated with higher grades in some developmental mathematics courses.