Effects of reading picture books on kindergartners’ mathematics performance

Abstract

This article describes a field experiment with a pretest–posttest control group design which investigated the potential of reading picture books to children for supporting their mathematical understanding. The study involved 384 children from 18 kindergarten classes in 18 schools in the Netherlands. During three months, the children in the nine experimental classes were read picture books. Data analysis revealed that, when controlled for relevant covariates, the picture book reading programme had a positive effect (d = .13) on kindergartners’ mathematics performance as measured by a project test containing items on number, measurement and geometry. Compared to the increase from pretest to posttest in the control group, the increase in the experimental group was 22% larger. No significant differential intervention effects were found between subgroups based on kindergarten year, age, home language, socio-economic status and mathematics and language ability, but a significant intervention effect was found for girls and not for boys.

Keywords:

• kindergarten
• mathematics
• intervention

Acknowledgements

The study reported in this article was carried out in the PICO-ma project that was supported by a programme grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO-MaGW/PROO: Project 411-04-072). We are grateful to the teachers who participated in the study. A special thanks goes to Sylvia van den Boogaard who was heavily involved in setting up the study and who worked with the teachers and collected the data.

Notes

1. In order to disentangle the explained variance of covariates and intervention we applied a stepwise regression analysis for both Model 1 and Model 2. For Model 1 (including pretest and intervention as covariates), the first step with only pretest included as a covariate led to R² = .698. This means that the difference with R² = .703 of Model 1 resulted in an effect size of ΔR² = .005. For Model 2, this effect size was ΔR² = .004.