Art activities during early childhood help young children express their feelings and thoughts naturally, and give them curiosity about the artisticelements of nature and things, abilities in creative expression, aesthetic sense, and emotional stabilit...
Art activities during early childhood help young children express their feelings and thoughts naturally, and give them curiosity about the artisticelements of nature and things, abilities in creative expression, aesthetic sense, and emotional stability.
The objective of the present study is to integrate the inquiry, expression and appreciation of art activities and to examine how activities integrating music, motions and dramatic plays centering on art activities affect young children’s creativity and aesthetic attitude.
For this purpose, we set research questions as follows.
1) What effects do integrated art activities have on young children’s creativity (fluency, originality, and imagination)?
2) What effects do integrated art activities have on young children’s aesthetic attitude (aesthetics, art history, art criticism, and formative expression)?
The subjects of this study were 50 four-year-old children at J Kindergarten at Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, who were divided into an experimental group (n=25) and a control group (n=25). In order to control differences in educational environment and method, we sampled young children from the same kindergarten in which the young children’s age, socio-economic level, and parents’ education level were relatively similar.
This research took the procedure of preliminary test, pretest, experiment and posttest. The period of experiment was 7 weeks from August 21 to October 10, 2008, and during the period the experimental group had integrated art activities 2~3 times a week and the control group had unit-based classes by the class teacher.
The young children’s creativity was measured with TCAM (Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement) developed by Torrance (1981) and translated by Jeong Min-ja (2005).
Aesthetic attitude was tested using the part for the aesthetic area in the evaluation model on the areas of body, cognition, perception, social emotion and aesthetics as suggested in the studies by Lasky and Mukerji (1985), Day (1980, 1985), Cotton (1981), and Gentile and Murnyack (1989), which was drafted by Lee Soo-Kyung and revised three times through preliminary observation and specialists’ reliability test.
In order to determine the effects of integrated art activities on young children’s creativity and aesthetic attitude, we obtained the means and standard deviations of creativity and aesthetic attitude from the pretest and posttest of the experimental group and the control group, and the two groups were comparatively analyzed through independent sample t-test.
The results of this study are as follows.
First, in the results of examining the effects of integrated art activities on young children’s creativity, the children in the experimental group who had experienced integrated art activities showed higher mean scores of fluency, originality, and imagination, the sub-factors of creativity, than those in the control group, and the differences were statistically significant.
Second, in the results of examining the effects of integrated art activities on young children’s aesthetic attitude, the children in the experimental group who had experienced integrated art activities showed higher mean scores of aesthetics, art history, art criticism, and formative expression, the sub-factors of aesthetic attitude, than those in the control group, andthe differences were statistically significant.
Based on the results of this study as presented above, it is concluded that integrated art activities are effective in improving creativity and developing aesthetic attitude in young children.