Development of attitude scale for animals for 4-6 year old children and effectiveness of the applied program

The aim of this study is to develop an animal love attitude scale for children in the 4-6 age group and to examine the effect of animal love education on children's attitudes towards animals. Scale development and experimental methods were used together in the research. In the research, two different study groups, scale development group and experimental study group, were used together. The scale development group consists of 244 children attending pre-primary education institutions in Isparta city center. The experimental study group consists of 35 children attending Süleyman Demirel University Nursery and Kindergarten in the 2019-2020 academic year. The data of the study were collected by the Attitude Scale towards Animals (HYTO) developed by the researcher. Cronboach alpha reliability coefficient of the HTTO was calculated as. 81. The Let's Know and Love Animals Program (HTSP) was prepared by the researcher for 4-6 year old children. The experimental group determined randomly was applied the HTSP and the control group was applied to The Ministry of National Education Preschool Education Curriculum. The Animal-Attitude Scale developed by the researcher was applied to the experimental and control groups as a pre-test and post-test before and after the HTSP was administered. The analysis of the data was done with the SPSS program. Frequency, percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation and t test, Mann Whitney U test and Wilcoxon test were used to analyze the data. According to the results of the research, no statistically significant difference was found between the experimental and non-HTSP control groups. The fact that there is no significant difference may be due to the fact that there are issues related to animals in the MEB Preschool Education Program and that the control group children (47%) have more pets than the experiment group children (10%). So that we should make children an early pet owner and inform them about animals.