The effect of informing normal children who continue kindergarten on their attitudes towards their peers with mental retardation

In this survey, it is aimed to investigate the effect of the informing program prepared about individuals with mental retardation on the attitudes of normal children who continue (preschool) kindergarten towards peers with mental retardation. This survey is an experimental study which has ?pretest- posttest? with a control group and its dependent variable is the attitudes of normal children who continue kindergarten towards peers with mental retardation, the independent variable is the informing program which is about the mentally retarded peers for the children who continue kindergarten. Exemplification of the survey is formed of 36 kindergarten student who are chosen by neutral appointment as being in the experiment and control group. To the students in the experiment group, a program has been applied for three days in a week which consists of total 10 sessions and each session has been about 20 minutes. No informing has been done to the students in the control group about the students with mental retardation. Informing program has been arranged as including the presentation of the information which is about the individuals with mental retardation, telling stories, simulations, joining of a guest speaker, performing of video recording and group discussion techniques. In the survey as a data collecting mean Effectiveness choice form and adjective list measure has been used. They were improved by Siperstein (1980) and their translation to Turkish and validity and reliability studies of their forms were done by Çiftçi (1997 ). In this survey, collected data has been analyzed by using SPSS 10.0 for windows (statistical Package for Social Sciences). For the repeated measures double sided variance, Mann-Whidney U test, T test has been used in data analyzing. Informing program has constituted a meaningful difference between the attitudes of the kindergarten students (experiment group) and the students who has not attended informing program ( control group) towards mentally retarded students. The gender of the normally growing students towards the students with mental retardation has not resulted in any meaningful difference.