The Effect of Quranic Stories on Preschooler's Self-esteem During 2015-2016

Self-esteem is one of the most important factors in personality development, which can cause increase in personality development and make positive changes in one's mental health. Reading the Quranic stories has a positive effect on children's upbringing and guidance. So, this study aimed to examine the effect of Quranic stories on preschooler's self-esteem.
In this semi-experimental study with a pretest and posttest design, 60 preschool students in Gonbad-e Kavus City were randomly selected and allocated into the two groups of excremental and control during 2015-2016. We performed 8 sessions (twice a week for 60 minutes) of Quranic stories on the groups. The Cooper Smith's self-esteem questionnaire was used to collect data. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (paired and independent t-tests) with the SPSS 16 software.
The results of the paired t-test showed that the self-esteem level in the control group before using the Quranic stories was 27.03 (4/7) and after that was 27.73 (4/6) (P = 0.054). The results of the independent t-test showed no significant difference in the self-steem level between the two groups only in the dimension of family self-esteem (P = 0.006).
The results of this study showed that the Quranic stories did not have a significant effect on children's self-esteem but it had a significant effect on family self-esteem. Families of preschoolers can be considered as an important factor at providing context for developing recognition and awareness on matters of faith and religious values.