Turkish Adaptation of the Early Learning Observation and Rating Scale—Teacher’s Form: Validity and Reliability Study and Path Analysis for a Turkey Sample

Ayhan Babaroğlu,Cem Koçak

doi:10.1155/2020/7963579

Abstract

Acquiring information on the complete development of children during their early childhood, observing their development, and identifying the domains in which they need support have always been very important. There is a parallelism between development in the early period and learning, and development learning is best achieved by learning in children. Children have very different development patterns. As development occurs simultaneously on a broad spectrum of domains, progress in one domain affects the progress in another domain also. Thus, identification of problems in early childhood is important in terms of assessment of child’s development and learning. The purpose of th study is adaptation of the early learning observation and rating scale—teacher’s form, developed by Coleman, West, and Gillis, to Turkish and the Turkish culture and evaluation of the causality relations between the learning domains through Path analysis in the Turkish sample. Methodologic descriptive and model testing design methods have been used. The study sample consisted of 166 children in the 4-5-year-old group, receiving education in 59 preschool education institutions, and 20 teachers. Simple random sampling method was used in sample selection. Following the Turkish adaptation processes, the validity and reliability of the scale were examined with a pilot study. It was observed that the scale had high appearance-social and scope-construct validity, and the results obtained were coherent with the usefulness and contribution results obtained in the original study. Strong linear relationships were found between each of the seven learning domains in the scale. The early learning observation and rating scale—teacher’s form, which was adapted to Turkish, was suitable for use in the Turkish sample and revealed the competence or incompetence condition of children in the learning domains of children correctly and realistically.

Highlights

Development is a product of heredity and the environment in every aspect, and while it may display continuity in certain aspects, it is mainly a phase in terms of other aspects [1,2,3]
It was determined that none of the items of the scale in the research application, consisting of 166 observations, had any adverse effect on reliability in any domain. us, it was concluded that content validity of each of the seven learning domains could be established without removing any item from the Early Learning Observation and Rating Scale (ELORS)
From detailed examination of descriptive statistics, the learning domains of children in the 4-5-yearold group in the Çorum sample in Turkey can be listed from best level to weaker level as receptive language, perceptual motor, social and emotional, expressive language, selfmanagement, early math, and early literacy. is order shows that best learning domains of children compared to others are receptive language and perceptual motor while the weakest compared to others are early literacy and early math (Table 8)

Summary

Introduction

Development is a product of heredity and the environment in every aspect, and while it may display continuity in certain aspects, it is mainly a phase in terms of other aspects [1,2,3]. Ese patterns, which are seen in all children and occur successively independently of cultural structures, are relatively independent of the environmental factors Children, starting their life adventures with birth, display a systematic development, which is established on learning, from most primitive life skills to more complex and advanced level life skills. Children can count two types of objects by matching them on one to one basis number conservation skill is not acquired; they can say how many biscuits they want, number of marbles of their friends, and whether these marbles are more or less than their marbles [16,17,18] In addition to these general development characteristics, examination of a child’s development reveals that it is complex and sophisticated. Identifying is important because this facilitates responding with appropriate support and moving in the right direction on what must be done subsequently [19]

Materials and Methods

Findings

Statistical Application of ELORS Turkish Form

Evaluation

Results and Discussion