The problems in family involvement process in preschool education and the effects of family involvement practises on promoting language and numeracy skills

This study aims to explore how teachers and parents maintain school-family communication, how they view family involvement practices, how they perceive the problems related to family involvement process, and how family involvement practices affect the development of children's linguistic and numeracy skills in preschool. This study utilizes a combined design of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The sample for the quantitative part of the study consists of 22 children (60-72 months) and their parents from a government preschool in a central district of Adana during 2010-2011 academic year. The sample was chosen from two classes where mix-age practices were done. The school is located in a middle-income socioeconomic district. For determining the children in experiment and control groups, the number of 60-72-month children and their TEMA-3 pretest scores were taken into consideration. The sample for the qualitative part of the study includes both the experiment and control groups' teachers and the parents (n=28) of the children in these classes. In the experiment group, the researcher sent activities related to linguistic and numeracy skills for parents and children to do at home while the control group had their current curriculum. Family involvement practices of the teachers in both experiment and control group were not interfered by the researchers. The implementation lasted 10 weeks. As data collection tools in this study, the researcher used story books, Test of Early Mathematics Ability (TEMA-3), control lists, semi-structured interview forms, observations and document analysis. Story book and TEMA-3 was applied to all children in both control and experiment groups as a pre-test and post-test. In this study, for quantitative data, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and Mann Whitney U Test analysis were done, and the significance level was found as p<.05. For qualitative data, the content analysis was applied. In this study, it was found that the teachers in both control and experiment groups have inadequate information and awareness concerning to the importance of family involvement, the planning and implementation processes of family involvement, the barriers against family involvement, their problems with parents, and their roles and responsibilities in school-family communication. Not only the teachers in both experiment and control groups but also all the parents acknowledge the family involvement practice as participation in the child's educational activities. The parents were found to be willing to communicate with the school and to participate in their children's education. However, it was found that they were not informed enough how to participate in this process and that they were not supported by the school and teachers. In addition, they had communication problems with teachers about family involvement. The families had some difficulties in involving their children's education, and these difficulties became major factor that influence the type of the family involvement activity and its quantity. There was no statistically meaningful difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of experiment group and the control group, in terms of the numbers of judgments per sentence and words, and the types of words. There was no statistically meaningful difference in the TEMA-3 pre-test and post-test scores of experiment group which did family involvement activities in numeracy and the control group which did not take such activities at home. Keywords: family involvement in preschool, language skills, numeracy skills