This purpose of this study was to determine the effects of cooking activities on preschool children's mathematical concepts and attitudes.
The research questions for this study were as follows:
1. What are the effects of cooking activities on the de...
This purpose of this study was to determine the effects of cooking activities on preschool children's mathematical concepts and attitudes.
The research questions for this study were as follows:
1. What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's mathematical concepts?
1-1 What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's classification concepts?
1-2 What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's measurement and order concepts?
1-3 What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's number concepts?
1-4 What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's space concepts?
1-5 What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's time concepts?
2. What are the effects of cooking activities on the development of preschool children's mathematical attitudes?
The subjects for this study were 23 kindergarten children from A elementary school and 17 kindergarten children from U elementary school located in U city in Gyeonggido. 23 children participated in the study as an experimental group, and 17 children as a control group.
For children's mathematical concepts, the children's learning preparatory test developed by Korean Educational Development Institute in 1988 and redesigned by Sangsook Park in 1999 was used. For children's mathematical attitudes, Ward's test tool (1993) based on the Fictional Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children (Hart & Pike, 1984) and translated by Jeongsook Hwang in 1997 was adopted.
The experimental group A participated in the 10 cooking activities for 6 weeks from March 31 to May 6, 2005, while the control group attended the normal educational programs.
The data collected were analyzed by using the SAS program to perform ANCOVA with the prior test results as a covariant.
The results of the present research were as follows:
Firstly, the cooking activities had positive effects on the children's mathematical concepts. The cooking activities also positively influenced the concepts of classification, measurement, order, number, space and time.
Secondly, the cooking activities contributed positively to the improvement of the children's mathematical attitudes.
Based on this study, cooking helped enhancing the children's mathematical concepts, and further promoted children's curiosity and interests as well as pleasure.