The effect of academic and language skills educational program on children’s cognitive abilities

Abstract

Problem Statement: Language and skills oriented activities are one of the important activities in the educational process and they provide the necessary foundations for the development of cognitive abilities. Research Questions: Is there a significant difference between the pretest and corrected posttest scores of experiment and control group children on Cognitive Abilities Test Form-6 Quantitative and Verbal dimensions?Purpose of the Study: This study aims to investigate the effect of Academic and Language Skills Educational Program on 61-66 month old Children’s Cognitive Abilities. Research Methods: This experimental study included 61-66 month old 64 children (34 experiment, 34 control) attending to kinder gardens in Ankara – Turkey during 2012-2013 academic year. To find out children’s level of reasoning abilities, “Cognitive Abilities Test Form-6” developed by Lohman and Hagen (2000) and adapted to Turkish children by İnal (2011) was used. The data was analyzed with statistical techniques. Findings: As a result, it was reported that there is a statistically significant effect with a large effect size between the control and experiment groups’ verbal dimension and quantitative dimension scores on the pretest and verbal dimension and quantitative dimension corrected scores on the posttest. Conclusions: In the light of findings, “Academic and Language Skills Educational Program” can be reported as facilitating children’s cognitive skills. The findings are similar in those of Hager and Hasselhorn (1998), Ünal (2007), Welsh et al. (2010), İnal (2011) all of whom studied preschoolers’ cognitive skills development using experimental designs.