The effect of Montessori education on the development of phonological awareness and print awareness

Montessori education program offers an alternative education opportunity for children, and it supports the development of children in early childhood period as well. In the study, it was aimed to examine the effect of Montessori education on the development of phonological awareness and print awareness, which are among the early childhood literacy skills. This study was conducted in a longitudinal research design. As the data were collected from the same participants, panel design was taken as the basis of the study. The study group was composed of a total of 50 children, 24 boys and 26 girls, in the" 4-6 age" group with normal development who received education in the Montessori class of a state nursery located in Sivas province of Turkey in the 2019-2020 academic year. As data collection tool, the "Scale for Evaluating Early Literacy Skills" (SEELS), which was developed by Karaman Benli (2013) and whose validity and reliability studies were carried out by the same author, was used. In the study, in order to examine whether there was a significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores in the phonological awareness and print awareness of children attending the Montessori Education program, dependent samples t-test was performed. In addition, in order to investigate whether there was a difference between the pretest and posttest scores regarding the participants' phonological awareness and print awareness in terms of gender, two-factor ANOVA test was employed. As a result of the study, it was determined that there was a difference in favor of posttest scores between the pretest and posttest mean scores of children with normal development in the "4-6" age group who were attending the Montessori Education program in terms of general phonological awareness, matching words starting with the same initial sounds, matching rhyming words, noticing the initial sounds of words, omitting sounds and syllables, connecting sounds, and general print awareness skills, and that this difference did not vary according to gender.