The investigation of 3 to 6 year-old preschool children's recognition of basic geometric shapes and the criteria they employ in distinguishing one shape group from the other

This study was conducted in order to determine the 3 to 6 year-old preschoolers' recognition of basic geometric shapes and the criteria they employed in distinguishing one shape group from the other. The research's working group consisted of 100 3-6 years old children from an institutional preschool in Adana. Data were achieved as a result of interviews conducted with the children individually. During the study recognition tests of triangle, rectangle, square and circle respectively were given to each child with two days distance and the children were asked to classify the shapes in the tests. At the end of each test the children were asked the reason of their classification. Variance analysis was conducted in order to understand whether there is a statistically significant difference between the age groups or not according to the children's achievement on the tests. Then Chi Square analysis was conducted to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the age groups or not according to the Children's recognition ratio for each shape.VI In Conclusion, it had been found that 3-6 years old preschoolers' couldn't reliably recognize and distinguish the triangle, rectangle, square and circle; although children achieve to recognize typical examples of shapes, when the typical examples' aspect ratio, skewness, orientation, size or properties of side were changed, they were disable to recognize the shapes. In addition, it had been found that while the children were classifying the shapes they mostly focused on the non-defining attributes, they didn't pay attention to the defining attributes of the shapes. Moreover it had been found that children pay much more attention to the defining attributes through the age. Key Words: Preschool Education, Teaching Mathematics, Recognition of Basic Geometric Shapes.