“According to the National Council of Teaching Mathematics (NCTM), effective teaching of mathematics facilitates discourse among students to build shared understanding of mathematical ideas by analyzing and comparing student approaches and arguments” (Flick & Kuchey, 2015, p. 38). While many educators are working towards creating learning environments more representative of the NCTM’s practices, that can be difficult considering traditional math instruction relies heavily on rote memorization and standard algorithms. In recent years, there has been a push to move students past simple memorization and into deep understanding of numbers and their relationships.
The literature review above does not include information about computational fluency as I originally thought number talks would mainly help to improve number sense. As I continued to research and prepare after the literature review was written, I discovered the strong connection between computational fluency and number sense. This document highlights the characteristics and connections between the two mathematical foundations.