The effect of early intervention program for improving working memory on working memory performance of gifted children

Studies that take into account the critical periods of development in early childhood and the individual differences of children show that education taken in pre-school period is a critical process affecting all areas of development of the child. The education of special talented children in this period should be based on an understanding that is appropriate for their learning characteristics and developmental characteristics in different fields. At the intersection of these concepts, the fact that serving pre-school children with special abilities has strong effects and the necessity of gathering information in the fields of both early childhood and education of special gifted children appears. Although the importance of identifying children with special abilities in the early period has been expressed for many years, very little progress has been made in programming early education interventions for these children. In the literature, it is seen that the need for such early intervention support and progress is needed in providing a wide range of programs for pre-school children. In scientific studies, although there is a consensus on the need for special talented children in preschool education, it has been revealed that it is one of the groups that receive the least service in education. Studies with different needs groups (special ability, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) and children with normal development show that working memory can be improved with education. Findings from these studies show that cognitive skills training has promising effects. Accordingly, it is a fact that early intervention in cognitive development is very important. In some studies, in the literature, it is seen that early intervention education is given to improve the cognitive skills and working memories of preschool children and positive results are revealed. However, it is seen that there is no study examining the kind of difference between working memory of specially talented children in preschool period and how this difference will change with an intervention program. As can be seen, the criticality of early childhood and the importance of interventions in this period reveals the necessity of early intervention programs for specially talented children who are cognitively ahead of their peers. Studies on working memory, which has an important place in the cognitive development of children in this period and which is a concept intertwined with cognitive activities, will shed light on new studies by feeding from the literature. Accordingly, the purpose of the study was determined as the study of the effect of the early intervention program for the development of working memory on the performance of working memory of specially gifted children in preschool period. In the study, unequal groups pretest-posttest experimental design was used. In this design, besides the experimental group, a group is determined for comparison or control purposes. While the dependent variable of the study is the working memory performance of preschool children, its independent variable is the early intervention program for the development of working memory. While the early intervention program for the development of working memory was applied to the experimental group, the control group did not benefit from this training. The study group of the study was 67, 17 for the experimental group, 17 for the control group and 16 for the normally developing experiment group, which continued pre-school education in İzmir Province in the 2019-2020 academic year. consists of children. The data collection tools used in the research consisted of three groups, namely the scales for determining children with special skills and normal development, the scale of determining the effectiveness of the early intervention program and the scales for determining the social validity of the study. Quantitative data obtained at the beginning and end of the experimental process were analyzed in SPSS 23.00 package program. The qualitative data obtained as a result of semi-structured interviews, which are another data of the study, were analyzed by inductive data analysis technique. In this analysis, the data were transformed into themes, and the frequencies and percentages were calculated according to the categories. Quantitative findings obtained from the study showed that the prepared early intervention program improves the working memory performance of children with both special abilities and normal development. In addition, students who participated in the study, their parents and teachers found the early intervention program useful and the research was found to provide social validity.