Schematising in early childhood education

The theme of this book is ‘schematising in early childhood education’. A schematising activity is every cognitive activity whose purpose is to construct and improve symbolic representations of the physical and the sociocultural reality. This participation is studied by means of an intervention in which the effect of introduction and training of schematising in early childhood on later mathematical learning outcomes is compared to the results of a control condition in which there is no introduction of schematising. The research question is as follows: What are the effects of introducing schematising to five and six year old children in an experimental setting on their mathematical understanding at age seven, compared to the learning outcomes of pupils in a control group where children did not practice schematising activities? We expected the children in the experimental condition to perform better on mathematics at the age of seven in the third grade of the Dutch educational system. The theoretical discussion and the research results indicated that learning to schematise in early childhood education is a promoting factor of later mathematical thinking.