The effect of "big math for little kids" educational program on the mathematical development of children aged 61-72 months old

The purpose of the current research was to determine whether there was an effect of the educational program of Big Math for Little Kids on the mathematical development of children aged 61-72 months old attending to a kindergarten.The population of the research comprised of children aged 61-72 months old with a normal development, attending to the kindergartens within primary schools acting under the Ministry of Education in the city of Ankara in the educational year of 2010-2011. A total 42 children who were at the age group of six, (n: 21) as the test group attending to Gülen Muharrem Pakoğlu Primary School and (n: 21) as the control group attending to Hamdullah Suphi Primary School, having a part time education and not having had a maths education before were included in the sampling of the research. In order to determine the effect of the educational program of Big Maths for Little Kids on the mathematical development of children at the age of 61-72 months old, an experimental design with pre-test/last test/quizzes in a control group was used. So as to learn about the children and their families, ?General Information Form?, for the evaluation of the application process of Big Maths for Little Kids Educational Program ?Checking Up Form?, Focused Assessment Form? and ?Continuous Assessment Form? were used and ?Progress in Maths 6 Test? developed by Clausen and al., (2004) and of which reliability work was carried out by Çelik and Kandır (2011) was used in order to determine the mathematical development of children.Children in the test group were applied the educational program of ?Big Maths for Little Kids for a period of fourteen weeks, five days a week. As for the control group, only preschool educational program was given.The data obtained though the forms aiming at assessing the application process of the educational program ?Big Maths for Little Kids? were given as frequency and percentages. For the analysis of the data obtained in the experimental process, Mann-Whitney U Test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test were used. At the end of the test, a significant test was found between the mathematical development scores of children in the test and control group in favour of test group (p<.05). On the other hand, it was found that the difference between the last test and quiz test scores of mathematical development of the children in the test group was not significant (p>.05)Depending on these findings, it was found that the educational program of ?Big Maths for Little Kids? was effective on the mathematical development of children and that its effect was permanent.