Knowledge and Language Development Promoting Behaviors of Caregivers and Language Development for 2-5-Year-Old Children at Child Development Centers in Subdistrict Municipality, Udon Thani Province

Abstract

This descriptive research aimed to study knowledge and language development promoting behaviors of caregivers for 2 to 5 years old children at child development centers in municipality subdistrict in Udon Thani province. The samples were 183 pairs of caregivers and 2 to 5 years old children selected with stratified random sampling method from 2 child development centers. Instruments were questionnaires consisted of 4 parts:   1) general information, 2) assessment of caregivers’ knowledge on promoting language development among their children, 3) assessment of caregivers’ practices to promote language development among their children and 4) child development assessment form according to the Ministry of Public Health’s Developmental Surveillance and Promotion Manual (DSPM). Content validity of knowledge and practice assessment forms had the item-objective congruence (IOC) of 0.66 to 1.00 with reliability using Kuder-Richardson 20 (KR-20) for knowledge assessment of 0.97. The practice assessment’s reliability using Cronbach's alpha coefficient was at 0.78. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics including frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations (SD).

The results from this study showed that: 1) caregivers’ knowledge on promoting language development among their children was at a high level (=19.14, SD=1.26) and the vast majority of the caregivers' knowledge was at a high level (96.17%); 2) caregivers’ practices to promote language development among their children was at a very good level (=3.22, SD=0.78) and more than half of the caregivers' practices was at a good level (55.74%); 3) language development in receptive language (RL) among children ages 2 to 5 years old broken down in groups of 2 to 5 years old, 2 to 3 years old, and 3 years and 1 month to 5 years old were age appropriate (95.54%, 100%, and 91.08%, respectively). Children’s language development in expressive language (EL) among children ages 2 to 5 years old broken down in groups of 2 to 5 years old and 3 years and 1 month to 5 years old were age appropriate as well (75.03% and 92.36%, respectively) while expressive language (EL) children ages 2 to 3 years old were age-appropriate at only 57.69%.