ผลของโปรแกรมส่งเสริมการเรียนรู้แบบมีส่วนร่วมต่อการปฏิบัติของครอบครัวในการประเมินพัฒนาการเด็กปฐมวัยในชุมชน

Abstract

Healthy early childhood development has tended towards a decrease in Thailand. Therefore, assessing parental roles in early childhood development will aid in finding abnormalities in order to allow for early treatment with developmental therapy. This study used a quasi-experimental two-group, pretest-posttest design to investigate the effect of a participatory learning enhancement program on family practices in assessing development in early childhood. The participants were parents or guardians of young children in a childcare center affiliated with the local administration and who were assigned, by simple random sampling for 48 persons, to a group which either received or did not receive the program. Purposive sampling was used with 24 persons per group. The instruments utilized in the tests included the Participatory Learning Enhancing Program devised by the researcher based on Participatory Learning (Kolb, 1984) for a duration of 8 weeks. Furthermore, an activities' learning plan from the Developmental Surveillance and Promotion Manual (DSPM) and video instructors were also used. The data collecting instrument was a family practice questionnaire on assessing development in early childhood, with a Kuder-Richardson (KR-20) coefficient of 0.90. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, the Chi-square test, the Fisher exact test and an independent t-test for analyzing demographic data between the two groups. The Wilcoxon matched pairs signed-ranks test and the Mann-Whitney U test were applied for comparing family’s practices in assessing early childhood development by average scores before and after, and between the two groups. The findings revealed that parents and guardians of young children who received the Participatory Learning Enhancing Program for 8 weeks had a higher mean score of family practices in assessing early childhood development (Med=5.5, IQR=1) with significance (p<.001) than before (Med=3, IQR=2) and more than the control group who received normal recommendations for early childhood assessment (Med=3, IQR=2) with significance (p<0.001). The results show that the Participatory Learning Enhancing Program helped participants to have early childhood development assessing skills leading to continuous family practice in assessing early childhood development in communities.