Early Home Intervention to Promote School Readiness: A Turkish Experience

Abstract

The paper presents the results of an evaluation research that studied the impact of a nationwide home intervention program, the Mother-Child Education Program, on both children and mothers immediately after the termination of the program and at the end of the children's first year of formal schooling. A prebost control group quasiexperimental design was used. There were 102 experimental and 115 control mother-child pairs, the total sample being 217. The results revealed that the Program has important effects on the cognitive development of the child as reflected in the significant increase in the performance of the group receiving training with respect to preliteracy and prenumeracy skills. When the children were followed in their first year of schooling, the experimental children were found to be better at in literacy and numeracy skills and had started to read earlier than the control group. Furthermore, their end-of-year grades were better than their counterparts. Teachers also perceived them as meeting the cognitive and social requirements of the school and being more curious, attentive, and creative.