The effect of drama in early childhood education on readiness forprimary school

Creative drama education is an effective method to improve children's school readiness in preschool period. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of creative drama education on the language and cognitive development of 5-6 year old children. In the study, children's cognitive sub-skills such as word comprehension, sentences, matching, copying, number readiness and general knowledge, as well as reading readiness and general readiness levels were evaluated. In the study, a pretest-posttest model was applied to analyze the effects of the instructional process, and Quasi-experimental design and nonparametric statistical methods were used. The study was conducted on a total of 24 children, 12 in the experimental group and 12 in the control group, attending a kindergarten in Ankara. While creative drama activities were applied to the children in the experimental group, the children in the control group followed the standard preschool program. Data were collected using the Metropolitan School Readiness Test and analyzed using the Mann Whitney U test and Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. The findings of the study showed that children in the experimental group made significant progress in language and cognitive skills. Especially in subtests such as word comprehension, sentences, matching, number readiness and general knowledge, it was observed that the experimental group made significant progress compared to the control group. In addition, significant differences were found in favor of the experimental group in reading readiness and general readiness scores.