The short-term effects of the home intervention program on the cognitive development of children

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate the short-term effects of the Home Intervention Program on the cognitive development of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Home Intervention Program was aimed at enriching children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds by means of mother training. It had two main components which are: a) a series of activities designed to help to foster cognitive development of children (HIPPY), b) another series of activities designed to help mothers to improve the child's social and personality development. In 1991 the program went through some changes especially the part which aimed cognitive development of children was redeveloped and put into application. Although the short and long-term effects of the initial program were investigated previously, no research was done to test the effectiveness of the recently developed cognitive part of the program. Hence, this study looked at the comparative program effectiveness on a randomly selected experimental group of 40 children and their matched controls from three low income areas of Istanbul, namely Kagıthane, Sarıyer and Besiktas. The hypothesis of the study was that children whose mothers attended the Home Intervention Program would perform better on all the measures utilized compared to children whose mothers did not attend any kind of program. Comparison of the experimental and control groups was done by utilizing t-test analysis. Moreover. comparison of the three experimental groups was carried out by means of analysis of variance (One-way ANOVA) . Results of the t-test analyses showed significant differences between the two groups on all measures. That is. children whose mothers attended the Home Intervention Program performed better on the WAT. Simple Classification Task. Multiple Classification and the Vocabulary subtest of the WISC-R compared to control group. Hence. the hypothesis of the study was confirmed by the findings. Comparison of the three experimental groups to investigate whether there would be differences between them indicated that. there was a significant difference between the three experimental groups only on Multiple Classification Task.