The effects of preschool attendance on children's perspective taking skills

The present study was conducted to analyze the impact of preschool education on the perspective taking skills of 48-72 months old children. The study group included 100 children (48- 54 months, 55-60 months, 61-66 months, 67-72 months) who attended preschool and with lower socioeconomic level at Niğde provincial center during 2016-2017 academic year and 100 children (48- 54 months, 55-60 months, 61-66 months, 67-72 months) who did not attend preschool. The study data was collected with "Perspective Taking Test for Children (PTC)," developed by Aslan and Köksal Akyol (2016) and the interview form developed by the author. PTC was applied simultaneously to children who did and did not attend preschool. Data analysis was conducted with descriptive statistics and normality test findings. The normality test was conducted by the Shapiro-Wilk test. Parametric tests were used due to the normal distribution of the data. T test was conducted to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between two groups and stepwise regression analysis was conducted to investigate which independent variables predicted children's perspective taking skills. The findings demonstrated that preschool education had a statistically significant effect on children's perspective taking skills. While there was no significant difference between the PTC scores of children who did and did not attend preschool in the three years old group, it was found that there was a significant difference between the PTC scores of children in four, five, and six age groups based on attendance to the preschool education. Furthermore, it was determined that the age and preschool attendance significantly predicted children's perspective taking skills, while gender, education level and occupation of parents had no significant effect on children's perspective taking skills. Keywords: Preschool education, social skills, perspective taking