Determining the validity and reliability of cognitive abilities test form-6 and investigation of the effect of reasoning education program on six year old children?s cognitive abilities

The purpose of this study is to determine the validity and reliability of Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 and to investigate the effect of reasoning education program on six year old children?s cognitive abilities.The population of the study included 61-72 month old children displaying normal developmental characteristics and attending to kindergartens in Afyonkarahisar, all which were affiliated to Turkish Ministry of National Education. The sample was composed of two groups. The first included 380 randomly selected children to determine the validity and reliability of Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 while the latter consisted of 82 (41 children for the control and 41 for the experimental group) children.In this experimental design, ?Demographical Information Form? to collect information about the children and parents together with the Turkish adaptation of Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 which was developed by Lohman and Hagen (2000) to determine children?s reasoning ability levels were utilized by the researcher. Regarding the reliability of Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6, Kuder Richardson (KR-20) values were found out to be .76 for the Verbal Battery, .82 for the Quantitative Battery, .70 for the Non-Verbal Battery and .91 for the overall test. Here, high KR-20 levels imply that the internal validity of the test is high.Children in the experimental group received a twelve week ?Reasoning Education Program? addressing the cognitive abilities. The test was administered to both groups as pretest and posttest. Moreover, experimental group children were given the same test as a permanence test four weeks after the administration of the posttest. Having analyzed the data, distributions regarding the demographical information of the children and parents were presented as frequencies and percentages while dependent samples and independent samples t-test scores were provided for the data collected through the experimental process.According to the findings, experimental group children?s total mean score for all the batteries in Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 was significantly found out to be higher than that of the control group children (p<0.05). In addition, a significant difference was observed between the experimental group children?s Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 total and Quantitative Battery posttest and permanence test scores (p<0.05). On the other hand, no significant difference was detected between the posttest and permanence test scores of Cognitive Abilities Test Form 6 Verbal and Non-Verbal Batteries (p>0.05).