This paper focusses on the outcomes of early childhood education and addresses three questions: (1) What outcomes can we put forward as most crucial? (2) When can we speak of real or substantial educational outcomes? (3) What are the implications of the answers to these questions for educational practice? A framework is presented integrating desirable outcomes into four categories: knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes. Two domains of development are looked upon more closely: physical knowledge and social cognition. For each of them a test developed within the Experiential Education (EXE) project is presented and the results on a group of 96 five-year olds (for physical knowledge) and 161 three-to-seven-year olds (for social cognition) are analyzed. The experiential and constructivist interpretation of the data supports the conclusion that education has to take into account the intuitive layer of cognition which is anchored in the basic schemes and develop this further to the level of scientific intuitions. In this view logico-mathematical competence is seen as an aid to, rather than the essence of, real understanding of the physical and social world.