The Effect of Empathy Development Program on Emphaty Levels of Second Grade Elementary School Students

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of empathy development program on empathy
levels of second grade elementary school students. The sample consisted of 20 (10 experiment group, 10 control
group) second grade students from an elementary school in Bakırköy, Istanbul. In the study a pretest-posttest
control group design was utilized. The experimental group took 8 sessions empathy development program
developed by the researchers. Scale of Empathy for Children, developed by Bryant (1982) and adapted by
Yüksel (2003) was used for collecting data from both experimental and control groups. In order to determine the
significant differences between the scores experiment and control groups, two way analysis of variance
(ANOVA) was conducted. The results indicated that empathy development program increased the empathy
levels’ of the students in experimental group but there was no significant difference for the control group