The Effectiveness of Quinn’s Early Childhood Education Program on the Self-esteem of Preschool Children

Background and Purpose: Preschool period is one the most important developmental periods in childhood that paying attention to it can lead to the development of healthy personality in adulthood, because concepts related to cognitive, emotional, affective, and social development are founded and evolved in this period. Accordingly, the present research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of Quinn’s early childhood training program on the self-esteem of preschool children. Method: This study was a quasi-experimental research with pretest-posttest control group design. The study population included all the preschool children (aged 5) and their parents (aged 34-42) in Isfahan city in the academic year 2016-2017. Through referring to the preschool centers and using convenience sampling, 30 children and their parents were invited to participate in the study. Then the parents were randomly assigned either to the experimental or the control group (15 individuals per group). Self-esteem Scale for Children (Azizi Moghaddam, 2007) was used to collect the data. Before executing the intervention (Quinn’s early childhood training program), the pretest was administered to both the experimental and control group. Then the experimental group received eight 90-minute sessions of Quinn’s early childhood training program. Upon the end of the intervention, both groups were administrated the posttest. Results: Results obtained by the analysis of covariance showed that Quinn’s early childhood training was effective on children's self-esteem (P<0.0005), in such a way that it could explain 29 % of the variance in the preschool children's self-esteem.  Conclusion: Quinn’s early childhood training program teaches parents the techniques of reinforcing the knowledge, memory, visual-spatial reasoning, cognitive skills, and fine motor skills and in this way improves the self-efficiency in children which consequently shapes the higher self-esteem in them over the time.