Investigation of the effect of silent book reading practices on social skill development of children in preschool period

The main purpose of this study is to examine the effects of silent book reading based activities on the social skill development of children attending preschool education. A quasi-experimental design with an unequalized control group and pretest-posttest design designed with the quantitative method was used in the study. The study group consisted of a total of 80 children, 40 of whom were in the experimental group and 40 were in the control group, attending a kindergarten of a public school in the Sultangazi district of Istanbul in the 2024-2025 academic year. The "Personal Information Form" and the "Social Skills Assessment Scale-Teacher Form" developed by Aksoy & Baran (2020) were used as data collection tools. The Silent Book Reading Based Social Skills Activities (SKOTE) program consisting of a total of 17 sessions, three days a week for 7 weeks, was applied to the experimental group. In each session, the children were presented with an interactive silent storybook and accompanying social skill activities were performed. In the control group, only the routine practices of the class teacher within the scope of the MEB Preschool Education Program (2013) were continued. Before the SKOTE application, a two-day study was carried out to meet the children and introduce the program. Descriptive statistics and normality distributions of the scores obtained from the pre-test, post-test and retention tests of the children in the experimental and control groups were analyzed with SPSS v26. Since the sample size was 50 and below, the Shapiro-Wilk Test was used to determine the normality distributions. In the data analysis, the t-test and repeated measures ANOVA were used to check whether there were significant differences between the pre-test, post-test and retention test scores of the dependent variable of the experimental and control groups, which was social skill development, and the Greenhouse-Geisser correction was applied in cases where the assumption of sphericity was violated. As a result of these findings, it was concluded that the development of the children in the experimental group was significantly better in terms of social skills (communication, assertiveness, adaptation, prosocial behavior) compared to the children in the control group. In addition, it was determined that there was a significant difference between the post-test and permanence test of the experimental group in favor of the permanence test. When evaluated in this context, it was concluded that SKOTE applied to the experimental group supported the development of children's social skills and had a permanent effect that continued to increase after the program. In this direction, the most important suggestion is to disseminate the program in a long-term structure that covers different age groups and includes both teachers and parents.