Comparison of school readiness of children who attend pre school classes, live with their family and belong to different social classes

In recent decades dramatic changes have taken place in the opinions of policy makers, researchers and educators about children's transition into school and many issues that affect school readiness. Once focused on distinct competencies such as identifying words, sentences, numbers, and also having general knowledge, matching and copying skills, school readiness research nowadays recognizes the decisive significance of early developmental experiences that promote the executive brain function and emotional-social regulation skills interface with and support particular cognitive and language capabilities to school capacity and engagement to learn in school. Important inequalities occur at school entry in those core learning and regulatory capacities that maintain successful engagement and transition in school. Socio economic factors are a specifically significant source of inequalities. Parental factors, including social isolation and family connectedness also increase the risk of school transition difficulties and learning delays of child. The contribution of this thesis illuminate the sources of the striking inequalities in children's achievement of many interrelated competencies provided in Metropolitan School Readiness concept, such as executive word and number identification, social skills, general competencies addressing numerical, matching and copying skills that affect school readiness. It also put emphasis on the role of socio economical differences on these inequalities and tasks of families and teachers to minimize those inequalities. These factors are analyzed from a theoretical perspective in the first section and the second section contains a field research based on Metropolitan School Readiness Test (MRT) which is conducted in order to measure the school readiness of 60 preschool children attending kinder garden in Eskisehir province. The main objective of the test is to analyze the effects of parental socio cultural and economic differences on the school readiness of the children in terms of the six dimensions provided in MSR test. The results of One Way ANOVA, Tukey HSD and variance tests showed that children of families that suffer social and economic hardship tend to experience lower rates of school readiness compared to more advantaged families. Key Words: School readiness, Metropolitan School Readiness, Preschool education