The effect of music education on social values and social skills of preschool children

This study aims to reveal the effect of music education on the acquisition of social values and social skills of preschool children. For this purpose, children's songs about social values were composed and musical activities were planned. The method of the research is a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental method. The application process is 12 weeks, including the first and last weeks pre-test and post-test. In addition, follow-up test was applied to the experimental group 3 weeks after the end of the study. The study group of the research (n = 26) consists of kindergarten students studying at Kartal Hesna Gündeş Primary School in the 2018-2019 academic year. 13 students constitute the experimental group and 13 students constitute the control group. In addition to pre-school education, the experimental group was subjected to 30 minutes of music education by the researcher for 10 weeks, twice a week. The control group continued only preschool education. The data collection tools of the research are Preschool Social Values Scale and Social Skills Evaluation Scale (4-6 years old). In analyzing the data, the Mann Whitney U Test was used to determine whether the experimental and control groups were equal in terms of pre-test and to determine their final levels after the experiment. The data obtained from the pretest and posttests of the experimental and control groups were also analyzed with the Wilcoxon Test. According to the results, it was determined that the sub-dimensions of love-tolerance, respect, responsibility, cooperation-cooperation, courtesy and general total posttest scores of the experimental group were positive from the pretest scores. In addition, the social values posttest scores of the experimental group were found to be more positive than the posttest scores of the control group. Follow-up test results show that music education has a permanent effect on social values. According to the other results of the study, when the social skills pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group were examined, it was found that music education did not affect some social skills, but had a positive effect on the majority of social skills. When the social skills posttests of the experimental and control group students were compared, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group in almost all sub-dimensions of social skills. Considering the follow-up test results, it is seen that music education does not have a permanent effect on the general total scores of social skills. In line with the results of the research, various suggestions were made to researchers and practitioners to benefit from music education more effectively in acquiring social values and social skills.