The effect of "Big Math for Little Kids" educational program on preschool children's number sense

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the "Big Math for Little Kids" education program had an influence on the development of children's number sense. Participants were seventy-seven children with the age range from 61 to 72 months attending semi-independent kindergartens affiliated by the Ministry of National Education (MNE) in Erzincan in the academic year of 2015-2016. Of the seventy-seven children, 38 were in experimental condition, while 39 were in control condition. For the six-week-intervention period, the "Big Math for Little Kids" training program was implemented in the experimental condition, while the activities planned according to the MNE Pre-School Education Program were used in the control condition. Children's math skills at the beginning and the end of the experiment were tested by the Anatolian School Mathematics Skill Scale (ANOMAT) developed by Erdoğan et al. (2014). Findings indicated that there was not significant differences between experimental and control conditions in children's initial skills in number sense, operations, and general knowledge of numbers. In other words, before the implementation, groups were similar in terms of number sense. Final analyses showed that the children in the experimental group gained more than those in the control group. This means that the "Big Math for Little Kids" program is more effective than MNE's early childhood program in improving children's number sense. Key words: Early childhood education, Number sense, Big Math for Little Kids