A Critical Review of Number Sense Tests

In the last decades, number sense has received a lot of attention in math education as it is necessary to acquire more advanced math skills. Knowing how to measure and evaluate number sense is important because it plays a crucial role in teaching mathematics at schools, particularly in pre-school and elementary grades. The present study was written to introduce the tests used by researchers and identify their strengths and weaknesses with a critical review methodology. Searching related documents in” Scopus”, “Web of Science” “Scientific Information Database” and “Noormags” from 2012 to 2022, 75 documents were retrieved with the key word ‘number sense’. Twenty-two of these documents were chosen based on their relevance to assessing the number sense of preschool and elementary school students. The exclusion criteria included review articles, articles related to the age group above 12 years of age as well as the age group below 5 years of age, and articles analyzing the content of textbooks. By examining the tests used in the selected studies, 6 tests were identified and analyzed using the determined indicators. The results showed that all the number sense tests dealt with the components of counting components, number recognition, number comparison, and operations on numbers. Based on the findings some suggestions were made for designing a native test to measure number sense.