Our 4th grade student in the psychology department, Özden Yüksek, has been granted support under the TÜBİTAK 2209-A University Student Research Projects Support Program with her project titled “Improving Word Recall with Tapping Gestures in Preschool Children”. This 12-month project has three main objectives: The first of these main objectives is to investigate the effects of using tapping gestures accompanying words on the target word recall performance of preschool children aged 3 to 5. The second of these main objectives is to investigate whether using tapping gestures is effective in remembering not only the target word but also the other words on the list. In other words, the aim is not to observe the local recall of the target word on the list, but the general recall of the words on the list that do not use the tapping gesture. Third, previous studies have investigated the relationship between tapping gestures and word recall in children aged 5 and above. There is only one study investigating children younger than this age group (3-4). Therefore, it was aimed to repeat the findings obtained from this single study with younger children and obtain similar findings.
We congratulate our student Özden and our project advisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı Aktan Erciyes, a faculty member in the Psychology Department, and wish them success in their research.