The effect of migration trauma preventive psycho-education programs on social adaptation of foreign students and host students

The migration process contains compelling elements for both immigrants and the host society. Children are among the groups that experience the most compelling in this process. In their home country, they have problems that are difficult to solve on their own, such as language problems, adaptation problems, education problems, and loss of parents. In this study, it was aimed to develop and test a psycho-educational program aimed at improving the empathy skills of local students against school-age foreign students who immigrated to Turkey. In the ongoing study with the basic concepts of migration and the education of immigrant children, it was aimed to emphasize that it is a subject that needs to be emphasized by including the psycho-education program. Experiment and control groups were studied in this study, in which the real experimental design, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was applied. In the real experimental design, the unbiased assignment of groups from the sample pool is provided (Karasar, 2020). "Empathy Scale for Children and Adolescents" and "Attitude Scale Towards Refugee Students" were used as data collection tools. In this study, which was carried out in the city center of Çankırı, a psycho-education application developed for 8 sessions was carried out. In this primary school, 14 students out of 74 students attending the 4th grade were divided into 2 groups with an unbiased assignment. At the end of 8 sessions, it was concluded that there was a significant difference in the pretest and posttest scores of the control and experiment group students in their empathic skills.