Investigation of the theory of mind based training program?s effects on the 48-60 months-old children?s cognitive perspective taking skills and prosocial behaviors

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of the theory of mind based training programs on the 48-60 months-old children?s cognitive perspective taking skills and prosocial behaviors In this research, the non-equalized control group model among the quasi-experimental models was employed. A total of 38 children including 20 children in the experimental group and 18 children in the control group were the participant groups of this research. Personal Information Form, Theory of Mind Scale, Prosocial Behavior Assessment Scale (Teacher Form) and the situational tests to assess each child?s cooperative and sharing behaviors were used to collect the data for this research. Within the scope of this investigation, the Theory of Mind Scale for pre-school children was adapted into Turkish and the KR-20 reliability coefficient was .50 and the test-retest correlation coefficient was .777. At the beginning stage of the investigation process, the pre-test was applied to the children both in the experimental and control groups. Then, twelve-session training program based on the Theory of Mind was applied to the children in the experimental group. The training program based on the Theory of Mind consists of theory of mind skills such as appreciation of diverse desires, diverse beliefs, knowledge access, and false belief and feelings; cognitive skills such as perception, attention, memory, and problem solving. The children in the control group were not given any education by the investigator. Immediately following the implementation of the training program, the post-tests were applied to the children both in the experimental and control groups. After four weeks following the post-test implementation, the retention test was applied to the children in the experimental group. As the result of this investigation, it was found that the performances of the experimental group on the theory of mind tasks were significantly (p<.05) higher on the post-test compared to pre-test; whereas there were no any significant (p<.05) increase of the post test scores compared to pre test scores on the theory of mind tasks except the information retrieval tasks. It is also found that there was no any significant difference between the post-test and retention test scores on the theory of mind tasks of the experimental group (p>.05). There was a significant increase between the pretest and post test mean scores of the experimental group on the prosocial behaviors (p<.05). However, there was no significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-test and post-test for the control group on the prosocial behaviors (p>.05).