Examination of pre-school children's visual perception skills with wordless book expressions

This research aims to examine the visual perception skills of preschool children through wordless book narratives; It was carried out in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year with 19 children aged 60-72 months studying at a pre-school education institution in Ankara. In the research, quantitative data were used using the "General Information Form", "Frostig Visual Perception Test" (Aral and Bütün Ayhan, 2016) and "Narrative Comprehension Illustrated Walking Questions" (Paris and Paris, 2003); Qualitative data were collected simultaneously by audio recordings of children's wordless storytelling. Wordless books named "Brick by Brick" (Ferri, 2018) and "Field Trip to the Moon" (Hare, 2021) were used as data collection tools during the interviews with the children. In the analysis of quantitative data, the relationship between visual perception and story comprehension questions was examined with Pearson correlation coefficient. Qualitative data were examined with content analysis. After the data taken from the children's voice recordings were transcribed, codes were created in line with the purpose of the research with an inductive approach. Categories were obtained from related codes, and themes were obtained from categories. The collected quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed and the results were combined to reveal the relationships between the data obtained from the two data sets. In line with the findings obtained in the research, it was concluded that there were positive significant relationships between children's visual perception scores, word counts and story comprehension scores. As a result of the qualitative analysis of children's wordless book narratives; Common themes of figure-ground distinction, visual attention, visual meaning and location in space/spatial relations were reached for the two books on visual perception.