The purpose of this study was to examine how Montessori-education program, one of different early-childhood education programs, was tied into the multiple intelligences of young children and how Montessori education affected their multiple intelligenc...
The purpose of this study was to examine how Montessori-education program, one of different early-childhood education programs, was tied into the multiple intelligences of young children and how Montessori education affected their multiple intelligence. It's basically meant to determine the efficiency of Montessori-education program.
The subjects in this study were 40 five-year-old young children in the city of Ulsan. Out of them, 20 preschoolers who attended S Montessori kindergarten were selected as an experimental group, and the other 20 who attended C regular kindergarten were selected as a control group. The experiment was conducted during a 10-month period of time from April 1 to December 20, 2004, except one-month summer vacation in August.
The instrument used in this study was Jeong Dae-hyeon(2003)'s Kc- MIDAS, which was a revised version of Shearer(1996)'s Multiple Intelligence Assessment Scales for kids, or MIDAS-for-kids. After pretest and posttest were conducted, the collected data were encoded and analyzed with SPSS Win 11.5 program. To figure out the effects of Montessori-education program on the young children's multiple intelligences and their subfactors, statistical data on mean and standard deviation were obtained, and analysis of covariance was implemented.
The major findings of the study were as follows:
First, the Montessori-education program turned out to have a favorable effect on the development of the young children's multiple intelligences.
Second, among the subfactors of multiple intelligences, the musical and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences of the preschoolers were little affected by the Montessori-education program, but that had a good impact on their logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist intelligences.
The above-mentioned findings suggested that according to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory, Montessori-education program was one of efficient teaching methods to step up the development of young children's multiple intelligences.
It's proven in this study that Montessori curriculum and textbooks were associated with the subfactors of multiple intelligences, and that they had many things in common. And well-prepared environments turned out to be effective for the growth of multiple intelligences. The effort by this study to lend credibility to the effectiveness of Montessori education was expected to contribute to enhancing the applicability of education.