Turkish Preschoolers' Question and Response Interactions During the Evaluation of the day

Abstract

Research has shown that children's responses differ depending on the questions asked. These differences alter the questions that can be posed to children in an educational environment and the expectations about their possible responses. Understanding children's questions and the abstract level of their answers is key to support their development in this direction. The current study analyzed the questions that 211 five-year-old children in kindergartens and preschools in Turkey asked during the "evaluation of the day" activity and the characteristics of their responses to these questions. Language interactions occurred between children, and 268 questions and 2,574 responses were transcribed. The analysis utilized the coding scheme developed by Bay (2020) with reference to the works of Zucker et al. (2010) and Chen and Liang (2017), which delineate various levels of abstraction. Children's questions were coded according to the four abstraction levels defined and their answers were coded according to the three abstraction levels defined on the coding scheme. The results revealed that children's questions were mainly at the recall level (45.9%), seeking direct information. Their responses to the questions were mainly at the factual level (56%), reflecting the known reality. In addition, it was also found that (a) children least preferred to ask creation questions (5.2%), which were aimed at expressing their original thoughts; (b) children mostly preferred to give realistic responses to recall, inference and creation questions, and personal preference responses to preference questions; and (c) children gave creative responses to creation questions. The research findings provide a foundation for future studies on the nature of children's questions and responses in the coming years.