Browsing by Subject "ymmärtävä sanasto"

Tiivistelmä - Referat – Abstract Aim. Basic concepts are concepts related to time, quantity and spatial relationships, and understanding them is important for later linguistic and cognitive development. According to previous research, basic concepts are acquired in partly universal order in kindergarten-age. There is little research on the understanding of basic concepts in Finnish speaking 3-year-olds. The aim of this thesis is to study how monolingual Finnish speaking 3-year-olds understand different basic concepts measured by the Boehm-3 Preschool-test (Boehm, 2001). The thesis also examines if there is statistically significant difference between younger and older 3-year-olds in the understanding of the basic concepts. In addition, it studies if test scores correlate with RDLS III-test scores and whether background variables correlate with test scores. This thesis is a pilot study of the suitability of an unofficial Finnish translation of Boehm-3 Preschool-test for the assessment of Finnish speaking children. Methods. Participants were 35 children from 8 different kindergartens in Helsinki. The research data consisted of Boehm-3 Preschool- and RDLS III-test scores. The data was analyzed quantitatively with statistical methods. The suitability of an unofficial Finnish translation of the Boehm-3 Preschool-test was assessed using validity and reliability, and qualitative analysis. Results and conclusions. 3-year-old Finnish speaking children of the study understood measured basic concepts well. The most difficult concepts in the test were “longest”, “around”, “outside”, “different”, “same”, in Finnish. There was a statistically significant difference between the two age groups. Older children scored better. Other background variables did not correlate with Boehm-3 Preschool-scores. Boehm-3 Preschool-scores correlated with the RDLS III-test scores and the reliability of the test was .79. The results of this study are directional. The sample size of the thesis was moderate and the score differences between participants were small.