An investigation of the effect of the drama method on acquisition of number and operation concepts by five-year old children enrolled at preschool education

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of drama method on the acquisition of number and operation concepts by fıve-year old children enrolled at a preschool. The study has an experimental design. The sample of the study consists of five years old preschool children from a kindergarten in the city centre of Bolu. The kindergarten has two classes of five years old children. In order to form the sample group, 20 children (10 male, 10 female) were chosen randomly out of 45 children. Later, experimental and control groups were randomly selected. There were 10 children in each group. ?Drama Based Number and Operation Education Program? was prepared to support the subjects? acquisiton of number and operation concepts. Experimental group was instructed using the drama based counting and operation concepts activities, the control group was instructed within the framework of the preschool education program. The education program was implemented for six weeks, three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Data was collected through ?Number and Concept test for the children between 48-86 months? which were developed by Arnas, Gül ve Sığırtmaç (2003) and ?Information Form?.The collected data were analyzed by using SPSS 16 program. The participants of the study met the hypothetical criteria required for the repeated measures in parametric tests. Thus descriptive statistics, two way analysis of variance for measures of single factor (Split-Plot ANOVA) and the test of Mann-Whitney U analysis were used in the study. In order to test the first hypothesis of the study, analysis of variance for repeated measures (Split-Plot ANOVA) was used. For the second, third and fourth hypotheses, the test of Mann-Whitney U, a nonparametric statistical technique was used because the participants were divided into subgroups and the number of participants was low in each groupAt the end of the study, the experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group on the number and operation concepts test. In other words, it was found that drama method was quite effective in the acquisition of and supporting the development of concepts of number and operation in children. Besides, the results of the study showed that gender, the number of brothers and sisters and the working situation of mothers did not cause any meaningful difference in the success of both groups on the number and operation concepts test.