Elementary school teachers are responsible for constructing the foundation of number sense in youngsters, and so it is recommended that teacher-training programs include an emphasis on number sense to ensure the development of dynamic, productive computation and estimation skills in students. To better prepare preservice elementary school teachers…

In this article, the author shares how his fourth-grade students' creative thinking concerning a long-standing research problem stimulated changes in his instructional strategies. He begins by providing an example which illustrates that the standard tool of democracy, the plurality vote, suffers serious deficiencies: "The winner can be the…