Functionality profile of five-year old children before entering school

Research shows that the warning signs, for the development of learning difficulties in many school-aged children with learning difficulties, start to show in pre-school age. With appropriate early treatment learning difficulties can therefore be predicted, mitigated or even prevented much earlier. Teachers and assistant teachers were evaluating 176 five-year old pre-school children. The questionnaire used in the thesis has been designed by Faculty of education in Ljubljana. The first part of the questioner verifies the child's general skills, competences and abilities, while the second part verifies his strengths and talents. Chronmbach alpha coefficient showed high reliability and internal consistency between different areas in the questioner. Our goal was to check whether the adequately covered areas in the questioner are the indicators of the child’s pre academicals skills and competences, from which we can deduct if the child is at risk of developing learning difficulties or whether the child’s occurring behavior is an indicator of potential talents or strengths. The main goal was also trying to create questionnaire norms for five year old children who are involved in pre-school groups and on the basis of the following, to develop an appropriate, yet simple software tool that will be widely available and useful. Using descriptive statistics and chi square test, we confirmed the entire hypothesis. The applied questioner can be a good instrument for detecting early signs of learning difficulties and strengths of the child, which may subsequently lead to talent. This allows the development and implementation of programs used to eliminate or reduce the incidence of problems in the field of academic skills