An Investigation of the Effect of Puzzle Design on Children's Development Areas

This study aimed to explore the effect of puzzle design on preschool children's development areas (cognitive, linguistic, motor, social, and emotional development). Randomly selected children with normal development who attend a preschool as part of a primary school in Ankara under the guidance of the Ministry of National Education were involved in the study. Then, two classrooms were randomly selected and one of the two was assigned as an experimental and the other as a control group by chance. Each of them consisted of 14 children with normal development. Data were collected through the Turkish version of the ‘The Brigance Early Development Inventory II’ (Brigance, 2004, ) adapted by Aral et al. (2008) to determine children's development areas (cognitive, linguistic, motor, social and emotional development) in addition to the ‘General Information Form’. Since the children's scores in the Brigance Early Development Inventory II did not show normal distribution, Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank tests were used to analyze the data. It was concluded that no significant differences between experimental- and control-group children's pre- and post-test subscale scores of the Brigance Early Development Inventory II were found according to the Mann-Whitney U test (p>.05). However, the difference between control- and experimental-group children's pre- and post-test mean subscale scores of the The Brigance Early Development Inventory II was found significant (p<.05).