The study isintended to understand effects of story-reorganizing activity to self-esteem of children. Self-esteem has been developed during infancy, and therefore, it is necessaryeducate children who depend upon others and are easily frustrated, to re...
The study isintended to understand effects of story-reorganizing activity to self-esteem of children. Self-esteem has been developed during infancy, and therefore, it is necessaryeducate children who depend upon others and are easily frustrated, to recognize themselves as valuable existences in order to lead their positive lives with generous mind, independence and responsibility. Persons who respect themselves can respect others as well. Also, positive thinking of themselves is a basis of smooth relationship with others, which takes an important role during their lives. Accordingly, in this paper, the effects of actual programs which can be applied in education fields or at home to promote self-esteem have been investigated.
For the goal of this study, self-esteem tests on 52 children who are under 5 years in H kindergarten located in Ulju-gun, Ulsan have been conducted. 30 children among them, who got under 90 scores out of 120, are collected and equally divided into two groups, a group for the experiment (male: 7, female: 8) and a group for comparison (Male: 9, Female: 6). Evaluation of self-esteem tests has been done based on that of self-esteem of infants proposed by Kim, Yeong-suk (1977), which had been modified and supplemented from subordinates of Harter and Pike's self-esteem test (1984). Evaluationof self-esteem of infants from Kim, Yeong-suk contains30 items in total. Subordinates are consisted of cognitive ability (6 items), peer acceptance (6 items), physical ability (6 items), mother acceptance (6 items) and self-acceptance (6 items). This research takestotal 7 weeks including screening test (1 week), pre-test (1 week), figure processing (4 weeks) and post-test (1 week). A test which is to select children for the experiment has been conducted through 1:1 interview.
Story-reorganizing activity program has been performed to the former group for 40-50 minutes. And three times per a week for 4 weeks from 1st term to 13th term have been done. The subject, "what should I do in order to go to elementary school?" has been taught based on the existing curriculum to the latter group for comparison by a class teacher. Collected data for the examination have been analyzed by using SPSS 12.0 program.
The results of the paper are below
After story-reorganizing activity and analyzingdifference in self-esteem between two groups, it is shown that the formergroup has 3.90 in cognitive ability, which is higher than 3.43 from the latter one, and accordingly, there is significant difference (t=3.66, p<.01). In screening test done before this study, the formergroup obtained lower scores in cognitive ability than that from the latter one. Therefore the result that the cognitive ability of the former group is improved more after executing the program can be comprehended. For peer acceptance, the former group has 3.73 which is higher than 3.12 from the latter one, which means that there is meaningful difference in statistics as well (t=4.33, p<.001). Besides, the former group shows higher score in physical ability than that from the latter one - they have 3.57 and 3.22 respectively - (t=2.18, p<.05). The formergroup obtains better score, 3.39 in mother acceptance than 2.91 from the latter one (t=2.38, p<.05). Finally, there is a significant difference in self-acceptance and the former group obtains 3.80 and the latter group obtains 3.28 (t=4.19, p<.001). The group for the experiment has3.68 in the total average score of self-esteem, which is higher than 3.19 from the group for comparison. It means there exists significant gap between two groups. (t=4.49, p<.001).
That is to say, the group for the experiment which has taken story-reorganizing activity acquires higher self-esteem than the group for comparison which has received conventional education based on existing curriculum. The results show that story-reorganizing activity has a positive effect on improvement of children's self-esteem. There should be continuous studies and suggestions for proper models of re-organizing activity to children's level to promote their self-esteem byapplying and evaluating this program in the future.