In the early childhood period children's decision-making processes

AbstractOne of the aims of the early childhood education is to equip children with the necessities of the changing and developing world. To be able to adapt to the fast changing and developing world, decision-making is a crucial life skill; for it has been seen that children have been frequently confronting situations of making decisions in their daily lives like the adults. Active learning teaches children the decision-making process related to learning and enables this process to work actively. Since there is interaction in the basis of active learning, it enables children to take some decisions relevant to learning process and to use their own intellectual construction. The period of time that a child is engaged in the active learning work is important for the development of decision-making process.The purpose of this research is to reveal decision-making processes of the experienced experience children who have been taking this education since they were four and those inexperienced unexperience children who have just started taking this education in the groups of active learning at the age of six, which is the early childhood period. In this research, half structured interview technique has been used, which is one part of the descriptive research techniques. To be used in the research, an interview protocol, which contains open ended questions, has been developed by the researcher and it has been used in all of the interviews. The children who belonged to the same socio-economic level in three private pre-school educational institutions and who were in the six-year-old group took part in the research. The groups were formed as experience teacher-experience child (n: 33), experience teacher-unexperience child (n: 22), unexperience teacher-unexperience child (n: 46). Since descriptive data have been collected, content analysis has been used in this research.At the result of this research, the children who took part in the group of experience child- experience teacher are seen to produce much more alternatives. It has also been observed that the children in the group of unexperience child-unexperience teacher have used imperative expressions much more than the other groups while speaking to each other. But in the group of experience child-experience teacher, expressions emphasizing cooperation have been found much more than the others. For this reason, spreading the methods and techniques of active learning in the early childhood education is of great significance