Investigation of the relationship between school-ready and self-regulation skills of 60-72 months-old children during the COVID-19 pandemic process

The purpose of this study was to determine the school readiness and self-regulation skills of children during the covid-19 pandemic and to find out the relationship between school readiness and self-regulation skills. The research context consists of 60-72-month-old non-kindergartners and active kindergartners from independent kindergartens and state-school kindergartens in the districts of Şahinbey and Şehitkamil throughout the academic year 2020-2021 who will start first grade in 2021-2022 and the mothers of these children. The research sample consists of 140 non-kindergartners and active kindergartners from 2 independent and 3 state-school kindergartens selected by the maximum diversity sampling method, who are reported to be at the lower, middle and upper socio-economic level, and the mothers of these children. In order to determine the school readiness of the children in this study, the "Metropolitan School Readiness Test" developed by Hildreth, Griffiths and McGauvran (1949), to find out the self-regulation skills of the children, the "Metropolitan School Readiness Test," which was adapted to Turkish by Oktay (1980) and the "Self-Regulation Skills Scale (Mother Form)" developed by Erol and İvrendi (2018), and so as to obtain information about children and their families, a 13-question "Personal Information Form" created by the researcher were benefitted from. The data obtained from the application were analyzed through the SPSS 24.0 program. During the analysis of the data, non-parametric tests such as Kruskal Wallis H-Test and Mann Whitney U Test were used besides descriptive statistics such as arithmetic mean and percentage values, as the data did not show a normal distribution. In addition, the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient analysis was used when examining the relationships between the Metropolitan School Readiness Test and the Self-Regulation Scale. As a result of the research; it was determined that during Covid-19 pandemic there was a low level of positive correlation between the school readiness test scores of the children and the total scores of self-regulation skills based on their mothers' opinions (r= .270; p<.01).