An Analysis of Graduate Theses on Early Childhood Education: The Case of Turkey

The primary concern of this study is to reveal the general tendencies (genders of the authors/supervisors, change in the number of graduate theses by year, number of research problems-results-suggestions, focal points, the corpus by research models/methods, data collection methods/tools, and population/sample group) of graduate on early childhood education in Turkey between 2005 and 2017. The sampling of the present research study consists of 182 graduate theses. The study relies on the retrieval of the desired data by document analysis through a systematic examination of the available theses by using a thesis examination form developed by the researchers. The results revealed that 85% of the authors were female and almost half of the supervisors were assistant professors and moreover 59% of the supervisors were female. The study also showed that a great majority of the examined theses contained 0-10 research problems, results and suggestions. It was also figured out in the study that the focal point of the thesesis majorly qualifications of preschool teachers, characteristics and tendencies of parents, effects of different approaches/methods on early childhood education, characteristics of children in early childhood education or at preschool age. It was observed that 68.1% of graduate theses were quantitative studies and that the least employed research method was observation (0.5%), case study (1.1%), interview (1.6%) and phenomenological method (1.6%), while the most frequently administered data collection tool, accounting for 65%, was questionnaire.