Abstract
The purpose of the study is to examine and proliferate pre-service teachers’ understanding of mental addition and subtraction and prepare them for teaching these topics to their students. Thirty-one elementary pre-service teachers enrolled in two sections of an arithmetic course at a public university in the United States of America, participated in a semester long study. A mental math strategies program, lasting 10 minutes of each class period, was implemented with the treatment group consisting of seventeen pre-service teachers. The control group was taught the same material excluding the mental math strategies program. Both groups’ strategies for solving one–step wholenumber problems and the pre-service teachers’ capacity to analyze their own strategies were examined. Results suggested pre-service teachers (both treatment and control) lacked knowledge for effective mental math strategies and were sometimes unaware of the strategies they used. This study presents novel approaches for improving pre-service teachers’ mental math computational awareness and skills. The results of the study suggest investing time in teaching the ideas of mental math to pre-service teachers to help them attain fluency.