Hannula-Sormunen, M. 1 , Rasanen, P. 2 , Mattinen, A. 2 , Kajamies, A. 1 & Lehtinen, E. 1
1 Department of Teacher Education, University of Turku, Finland
2 Niilo Maki Institute, Finland
Here we present a quasi-experimental intervention study on a new remedial program for four to five year-old children with difficulties in learning basic numerical skills. 'Teddy Bear Math' (TBM) program (Mattinen, Rasanen, Hannula & Lehtinen, 2008; 2010) is a systematically progressing one-year curriculum on basic number skills for children with difficulties in early numerical skills. The program is built on training of children's metacognitive skills contains weekly small group sessions at day-care settings, bridging numerical activities to daily life, as well as materials for cooperation with parents.TBM is based on general enrichment programs (Feuerstein et al., 1980; Greenberg, 2000; Haywood, Brooks & Burns, 1992) and to the ideas of socially constructed learning (e.g. Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978) in which all activities were introduced to the children in variety of games and everyday contexts of a teddy bear family. Numerical training started from dealing with approximate numbers and very small exact numbers and progressed to counting up to ten items, adding, subtracting and comparing of exact numbers. Design of the one-year longitudinal study with pre-intermediate-post and delayed post-tests included an experimental group (n = 9) taking part in TBM and an age and skill matched control group (n=9) taking part in a listening comprehension program, which shared the same instructional structure and metacognitive training as TBM. Participants' (mean age 4 yrs 4 months) spontaneous focusing on numerosity, cardinality recognition and number sequence production skills were under the median of 4-year-old children's skills.Results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in cardinality recognition skills. The TBM program, which is tightly integrated to everyday contexts, is effective in remediating young at-risk children's numerical skills, and thus show that there is a great deal of potential in developing programs that may help children early enough to prevent failure in later mathematics.