The effect of riddles on problem solving skills of 57-66 months old children

This study aimed to examine the effect of riddles on the problem solving skills of 57-66 months old children. In the 2020-2021 academic year, 16 children (9 girls, 7 boys) studying in the kindergarten of a private school affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in Muş city center; A total of 32 children, 16 children (11 girls, 5 boys) studying in the kindergarten of a different private school affiliated to the Ministry of National Education, constituted the study group of the study. In the research, one of the weak experimental designs, the pre-test-post-test unequaled group design was used. Before the actual application process of the research, the pilot implementation of the research was carried out between February and March of the 2019-2020 academic year. During the pilot implementation process, 12 activity plans were implemented, the places deemed necessary in the implemented plans were rearranged in line with the expert opinion and the plans were finalized. Before the data collection process of the study, necessary permissions were obtained from the Muş National Education Directorate, and then consent forms were sent to the parents of the experimental and control groups. Data collection process started after parental consent was obtained. During the data collection process, the "General Information Form" created by the researcher, containing personal information about parents and their children, and the "Teacher Information Form" were used to obtain information about the children's teachers. To obtain information about whether the language-cognitive levels of the groups show normal development in the "Ankara Development Screening Inventory (AGTE) Language-Cognitive Section" developed by Sezgin and Erol (1994), which was filled out by parents to have information about the linguistic-cognitive levels of children in both groups. It was used for the purpose. The "Problem Solving Skills Scale (SPSS)" developed by Oğuz and Köksal-Akyol (2015) was used in the study to measure the problem solving skills of children. Before the application, "SPSS" was applied to the experimental and control groups by the researcher as a pre-test, and then the process of applying the activities started. 16 riddle activities prepared by the researcher were applied to the experimental group of the study, two days a week, for a total of eight weeks. The control group of the research continued their normal education process. After the application, "SPSS" was applied to the experimental and control groups by the researcher as a post-test. 3 weeks after the end of the application, "SPSS" was applied to the experimental group by the researcher as a retention test. While applying the "SPSS", the children's responses were first recorded by audio recording and then evaluated by the researcher in accordance with the assessment form of the scale. The data obtained at the end of the application; ANCOVA was analyzed with Single Factor ANOVA for Repeated Measures and T Test for Associated Measures. In the light of the findings obtained from the study, according to the results of the ANCOVA test, there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group (p <.05); it was observed that the experimental group's posttest scale mean scores were higher than the control group. When the difference between the pretest-posttest-retention test scores of the experimental group was examined with the ANOVA test for Repeated Measures, a significant difference was found between the pre-test and retention test of the experimental group and the post-test and retention test (p <.05). Finally, when the posttest and retention test scores of the experimental group were examined with the T Test for the Related Samples, it was determined that there was no significant difference between the scores (p> .05). Based on this result, it was concluded that riddles were effective on problem solving skills and this effect persisted until the retention test was applied.