Meta-analysis of educational practices supporting social skills of preschool children in Türkiye

This study was conducted to examine the effect of social skills training practices applied to preschool children on the social skills of the children trained by using meta-analysis method. The meta-analysis method, which is one of the systematic synthesis methods, was adopted in the research, and it was conducted in the form of analyzing and interpreting quantitative data obtained from independent studies with statistical procedures. The sample consisted of data from 17 independent samples representing 869 participants from master's and doctoral studies in line with the inclusion criteria. The comprehensive Meta-Analysis software in the MAJOR package of Jamovi version 1.6.15 was used for meta-analysis. With this program, the results of a total of 17 studies within the scope of 14 studies were synthesized and effect sizes were determined. With this program, the results of 17 separate studies were synthesized and effect sizes were determined. In addition, it was examined whether there were differences in the effect sizes of 17 studies between different years (before 2016 and after 2016) in terms of publication types and publication year. As a result of the analysis, the random effects model shows a value of 0.862. The analysis shows that the confidence interval varies between 0.43 and 1.28 and the significance level is p < 0.001. The fact that the effect value is 0.862 means that the Social Skills levels of the children in the experimental group increased significantly as a result of training and similar practices within the scope of the comparison of the experimental and control groups. In terms of publication type, doctoral dissertations show a larger effect size (EB = 1.41) than master's theses (EB = 0.690), while the confidence intervals overlap. Considering the years of publication, there are differences in effect sizes between different years (Q = 88.61, df = 1, p = 0.024). In particular, post-2016 showed the strongest positive effect (EB = 1.37) with a high level of residual heterogeneity (I² = 79%).