The effect of play-based math activities on different areas of development in children 48 to 60 months of age

Abstract

There are previous studies in the literature conducted on the effect of play-based math activities on the mathematical skills, language, and cognitive development of preschool children. However, the number of studies conducted to determine the effect of play-based math activities on different areas of development in preschool children was too few. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of play-based math activities on different developmental areas (personal-social, fine motor, language, and gross motor development) of children 48 to 60 months of age. The pretest/posttest quasi-experimental research design with control and experimental groups was employed in this study. The research group of this study is composed of 45 children 22 of whom (10 girls and 12 boys) were in the experimental group and 23 (10 girls and 13 boys) in the control group. Denver II Developmental Screening Test was used as the data collection tool. As a result, it was determined that there was a significant difference between the subscales and pretest-posttest total scores concerning personal-social, fine motor, and language areas in the experimental group, while there was no statistically significant difference in the gross motor subscale. In addition, it was observed that there was statistically no significant difference between pretest-posttest scores concerning personal-social, fine motor, language, gross motor subscales and total scores of the control group. The result revealed that play-based math activities have a positive effect on personal-social, fine motor, language, and gross motor developments of children. Further studies can be planned to investigate the effects of play-based mathematics education integrated with different activities where children can have fun and be physically active on children's developmental areas.