Abstract
The aim of this study is to comparatively examine the views of the preschool and primary school teachers about the criteria that qualified children books should have. The research group is comprised of 297 teachers (130 preschool teachers and 167 primary school teachers—of the first graders). The views of the teachers concerning the criteria that qualified children books should have were collected through the “Principle of Suitability for Children Scale”. The obtained data were analyzed in two stages. During the analyses, initially the general distributions of the answers of the teachers to the items of the scale were examined, and subsequently, it was examined how these answers differed based on certain personal and professional properties. In order to examine the general distributions of the answers of the teachers to the scale, item-based percentages and frequencies were calculated. For investigating how these answers differed based on certain personal and professional properties, a series of the Mann-Whitney U and the Kruskal Wallis tests were conducted. The findings demonstrated that the teachers are generally responsive to the basic criteria that qualified books children should have. In more detail, it was observed that there were statistically significant differences among the views of the teachers according to their professional teaching branch, age, and work experience. In light of the recent developments of children’s literature, these findings were discussed in detail concerning the importance of children’s literature for the preschool and primary school periods.
Key words: Children’s literature, children books, book selection criteria, preschool teachers, primary school teachers.