Reasoning about Representations: Effects of an Early Math Intervention

The study disseminates the results of a longitudinal randomised intervention that focuses on numeracy among children in their final year at kindergarten. The objectives of the study were (1) to investigate the effects of the intervention on the immediate post-test and on the follow-up test one year later, and (2) to investigate whether the children’s visual and verbal working memory and their understanding of grammatical language in the pre-test could predict the children’s mathematical skills measured by the post- and follow-up tests.

The analyses of the intervention and control groups’ results on the pre- and post-tests show that the intervention had a clear effect on the children’s numeracy. The effect continued to be measurable on the follow-up test nine months later, when the children were in Year 1. The analyses indicate a correlation between improved working memory related to visual spatial awareness on the one hand and numeracy on the other. The study found no correlation between these at a later stage, which indicates that working memory related to visual spatial awareness is most important at the start of mathematics education. The study also found no correlation between language skills on the one hand and mathematics skills or text comprehension on the other. However, it identified a correlation between verbal working memory on the pre-test and reading skills/text comprehension on the follow-up test nine months later.

Nine Swedish pre-schools, each with twelve pre-school classes, participated in the study. The study was designed so that the children were first randomly divided into an intervention group and a control group (six pre-school classes in each group). The children in the intervention groups received 30 minutes of daily, structured mathematics teaching over a period of ten weeks. The control groups continued with regular teaching. Half of the children in the intervention group were randomly selected to take the tests. The remaining half were excluded from the study.

Sterner, G., Wolff, U. & Helenius, O. (2020). "Reasoning about Representations: Effects of an Early Math Intervention". Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 64(5):782-800.