This research aims mainly at making advance in ICT application at the fields of Young Children Education, with sub-analyses on: current status of hardware and software at the hand of Young Children's Educational Institutions and their ICT application ...
This research aims mainly at making advance in ICT application at the fields of Young Children Education, with sub-analyses on: current status of hardware and software at the hand of Young Children's Educational Institutions and their ICT application in action; prerequisites for the ICT to be integrally operable within the turf; and inquisitions on the Young Children Education-related websites popular among the teachers about whether their content is fully reflexive of the standard Kindergarten Curriculum. Two research questions below will lead the study:
First, What is the current status of the Kindergarten teachers' ICT capability?
Second, In what terms can the aptitude of the Young Children Education-related websites be estimated as compared to the standard Kindergarten curriculum?
Methods for analyses on these questions rely largely on responses to a questionnaire designed to assess the teachers' ICT capability. Developed from one used at previous studies, the questionnaire underwent multiple check on its relevance by experts on Young Children Education, and subsequent revisions with help of 18 teachers at field who participated in preparatory survey, before it went to actual distribution. For 159 participants working at Young Children Education institutions around metropolitan area of Seoul and Kyoungki Province, it asked questions of: individual backgrounds of the respondent, their environment for ICT application, their training and practice in ICT within curriculum, their computer capability, and their estimates and anticipation for ICT-related eduction, etc., with a total of 61 entries.
As a tool to assess web sites related to the Kindergarten curriculum a checklist of Kindergarten curriculum-aptitude was proposed, based on sections on Kindergarten curriculum at Guide to the Kindergarten Curriculum, a table of living themes at A Companion to Kindergarten Education (Yoo 2001), and thematic analyses on Young Children Education activites (Hwang et al. 2001) Sampled out from responses to the questionnaire above on the most frequented ones, eleven Young Children Education-related sites was put into analsis persuant to the checklist, in terms of Kindergarten curriculum-aptitudes, living themes, activity types and respective focus of their materials. Statistical processing of the elicited data was conducted with SPSS WIN 12.0 program to give mean, standard deviation and frequency, and Percentage Chi-square as required.
The results can be summarized as following:
First, observation on Young Children Education teachers' ICT capability unveiled that despite wide spread use of computer integrated within a single theme in a classroom, absolute shortage of platforms and softwares- with Public Kindergartens as exceptions to the latter, though- is the main blockage to ICT application fully merged with a yearly curriculum. Type of institutions was also a factor that made divergence in both ICT-related practices and plans. Many teachers were consuming not little time in searching for information in need, but deficiency both in yardstick and recognition on desirable Young Children Education sites and lack of diversity among them were forcing them to be rather disappointed, rendering curriculum-related ICT guidances and teaching-plan guidebooks to be weighted among policy priorities.
Second, inspection into aptitude of Young Children Education sites to the standard Kindergarten curriculum showed their rather successful adaptation to the field's requests, as illustrated by all sites ranked first to fifth, and multimedia-based ones as well, giving stress on science life field and expression life field, items under teachers' preference, and on living themes of seasons and animals, also frequented by teachers. Overlapping materials and irrelevance of some content to its subject, however, require further refinements that purport to match given entries of living themes and standard curriculum. Usually text-oriented approach of the sites should be noticed as well, where teachers' yearning for multimedia items that can be directly applied into the field should be responded by feedbacks from developers and managers and related authorities, and ultimately by user-friendly design of the materials.