The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of family related mathematical activities through use of storybooks on young children`s mathematical problem solving ability and perception of parent.
The research questions were as below:
R...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of family related mathematical activities through use of storybooks on young children`s mathematical problem solving ability and perception of parent.
The research questions were as below:
Research question 1. do family related mathematical activities through use of storybooks affect the young children's mathematical problem solving ability?
Research question 2. do family related mathematical activities through use of storybooks affect perception of parent about mathematics education to young children?
For this study, 40 kids around 4year old from S kindergarten located at Seoul, Nowon were targeted as an object of this study. From S kindergarten, 20 kids of Dasomi class were in experimental group and 20 kids of Gwiyumi class were in comparison group.
The checking tool used to measure the children's mathematical problem, Kim Hyun Joo (2000) has produced the 5th and 6th kindergarten curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1994) following the criterion of mathematics curriculum to develop the models (Kwon Young-Rye, Lee Young-Ja, Lee Jung-Wook, 1998) for 3ㆍ4ㆍ5 year old children which Im Eun-Wha (2006) has divided into four regions and used the checklist with rearranged questions.
The 2008 experiment was held from 10th of November to 9th of December on 16 home-based mathematical activities. Both experimental and comparison groups of mathematical activity using the story at kindergarten were held once a week, the home room teachers were in charge of experimental group and the researchers were in charge of comparison group during the 4 times of activity. For experimental group, the mathematical activity utilizing storybooks from kindergarten has been progressed by the parents with the worksheets and preparations for 16 times with family related mathematical activity. As the parents began the experiments, post-activity evaluations were allocated, and were collected after the experiment.
After all the experiments, there was an interview with some parents to discuss about the difficulties during the experiments. To determine the effectiveness of experimental treatment, the children's mathematical problem solving ability pre-test and post-test was conducted, and the collected data was statistically processed using statistical program SPSS 17.0. Average score and calculated standard deviation for both experimental and comparison groups, and the difference between the two groups were verified. To find out the impact on the perception of parents about family related mathematical activities by utilizing storybooks, the collected post-activity evaluations were analysed and interpreted its meaning by categorizing each types of content.
Results of this study are as follows.
First, the children who experienced the family related mathematical activities utilizing storybooks showed a significant improvement than the children who did not experienced. According to the result of lower divisions, the number and operation, spatial, statistical tests excluding the classificatory concept showed the statistically significant improvement.
Second, the parents who carried out storybooks used home connection mathematics activities, perceived that the activities aroused children's interest and were profitable for the mathematics education with understanding of the purpose and necessity of mathematics education in early childhood and its substance that it requires not only existing number counting, reading, and writing of the figures, addition, subtraction, but also fostering the sense for the number, knowing the space & figure, trying basic measurement, understanding the regularity, arranging a data & expressing a result. Besides, they found out the better way of educating young children that it has to be offered in the form of interesting concrete materials in the context related to daily life rather than teaching-learning material centered mathematics education for the children to have chance to find out relationship, to infer and think mathematically and for such great mathematical experience needs a great deal of parental role.
As seen from the results above, the storybooks based home connection mathematics activities proposed natural mathematics activities through the course of reading storybooks with their parents which arousing young children's interest, and the individual learning using the contents, characters, things in the storybooks effectively, raised the problem solving power of individual young children. Besides, such activities enabled the parents to understand better about the mathematics education for young children that the mathematical activities hold more various contents better than teaching-learning materials. Those parents took interest in mathematical activities more seeing their children and their thinking being expanded, and perceived that their roles take a great part for their children to get mathematical experiences.