The purpose of the study is to see how physical activities influence young children’s pro-social behaviors such as leadership, helping, communication, initiative-concern, trying proximity (child's willingness to work closely with peers), sharing, em...
The purpose of the study is to see how physical activities influence young children’s pro-social behaviors such as leadership, helping, communication, initiative-concern, trying proximity (child's willingness to work closely with peers), sharing, empathy and self-regulating.
To achieve the purpose, the following study theme was set up.
How do physical activities influence young children's pro-social behaviors such as leadership, helping, communication, initiative-concern, trying proximity (child's willingness to work closely with peers), sharing, empathy and self-regulating.
The study was done with 44 young children from three kindergartens annexed in the elementary schools in Asan, Chungnam, 25 young children (8 boys and 17 girls) of the experiment group and 19 young children (8 boys and 11 girls) of the comparison group. To conduct the experiment, the experiment group did physical activities based on the young children themselves while the comparison group did physical activities led by the teachers. Total 15 times of experiments were done twice a week for 8 weeks, May 21~July 13, 2007.
As for the study tool, PBSYC (Prosocial Behavior Scale for Young Children) developed by Kim, Young-Ok (2003) was used to see young children’s pro-social behavior. With using the tool, two observers monitored and checked the young children respectively, in a free activity time.
To verify the study theme, average scores of prior-test and post-test were analyzed by the program, SPSS for 12.0. The distribution of sex and age between the groups were compared by cross-tabulation analysis and behavior scale comparison between the groups was analyzed by independent samples, t-test.
The findings from the study were as follows.
There was a statistically meaningful difference in young children’s pro-social behaviors between the experiment group with physical activities and the comparison group with teacher-led physical activities. The girls who had done physical activities showed higher scores in leadership and sharing than the boys in the experiment group.