The effect of concrete and virtual manipulative supported mathematics education program on the early arithmetic skills of 48-72 months of children

The purpose of the research is to examine the effect of concrete and virtual manipulative supported mathematics education program on the early arithmetic skills of children between 48-72 months of age. The participants of the research are 60 children in 3 kindergartens in a low socio-economic primary school in the center of Gaziantep, Şahinbey, in the 2019-2020 academic year. In order to find answers to research problems, a quasi-experimental research model with a pretest-posttest control group, which is one of the quantitative research designs, was used. As part of the framework of the model, two experiments and a control group were created in accordance with the purpose of the research. The application was conducted 15 weeks between October 14, 2019 - February 22, 2020. All 3 groups were given the same list of skills and gains that they would follow weekly during this process. Experiment-1 group by use of both concrete and virtual manipulative supported training, experiment-2 group by use of concrete manipulative supported training performed and the control group completed process the existing teaching programme without using any manipulative. The Updated Early Arithmetic Test (GEAT) adapted into Turkish by Kaçıra (2019) was used as the data collection tool in the study. In the analysis of the data, normality test, dependent sample t-test, one-way and two-factor ANOVA test and post-hoc test statistics were used. Research findings; according to GEAT pretest analysis, there is no statistically significant difference between the groups. After the applications, there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental groups and the control group according to the posttest scores. There was no significant difference between the experimental groups. When each study group was evaluated within itself, a statistically significant difference was found between the pretest-posttest scores in all three groups. According to the two-factor ANOVA test results in which group variable and GEAT pretest and posttest scores were evaluated together, only a significant difference was found between experimental-1 group and control group. There was no statistically significant difference between experiment-1 and experiment-2 groups and experiment-2 and control groups. While the early arithmetic skill that the children achieved the highest success was "comparison", the lowest success was seen in the "prediction" skill. As a result, it was understood that concrete and virtual manipulative supported mathematics education program had a positive effect on increasing the arithmetic skills of 48-72 month-old children. The combination of concrete and virtual manipulatives has enabled children to achieve higher success in this skill.