Does daycare centre experience and it's aim matter?

Abstract

SUMMARY The paper evaluates the existing centre based early childhood education system in Turkey within the context of a 4 year longitudinal research project, ‘Comprehensive Early Enrichment Project’ (Kagitçibasi, Sunar & Bekman, 1988; Bekman, 1990, 1993, 1996, in press). The project had 2 aims; a) to develop a home intervention model, b) to assess the impact of three different educational contexts; educational, custodial and home care, on children's behaviour. In the project, 6-day care centres, 255 children and 12 teachers were incorporated. Since the basic aim of the project was to study the overall development of the child, various different measures such as observations, tests and interviews were used as means of assessment. Information about the children was collected when the children were 3 & 5 and 6 & 8 years of age respectively. The first year measurements provided in-depth information about the two main environments of the child's home and school, and formed the base line. The data collected in the fourth year of the project made possible the examination of the short-term impact of the different contexts of development on children. The assessments were made again 6 years after the programme project was over when the children were 11 and 15 years of age. Due to attrition in the follow up research, 217 were reached from the original number of 255. Results supported the expectation that the type of service provided in the early years has important effects on the overall development of children.