As progressive educational philosopher J. Dewey insisted “that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others...,” it is important for people to have experience throug...
As progressive educational philosopher J. Dewey insisted “that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others...,” it is important for people to have experience through which they can consider positions of both themselves and others together through the various networks of human relations that are formed during infancy. In addition, as the National Kindergarten Curriculum revised in 2007 stressed on the basic ability for children to know and respect themselves, to control their own thoughts and behaviors learning how to live with other people, and to be interested in surroundings and adapt themselves to those, it tries to promote development of right sociability, applying Buddhist early childhood education-centered meditation activities considering experiences and interests to the field applying learning to live together, that is, education that can be the base of the world view respecting human and nature during infancy and to analyze the effect on children's self-control and self-efficacy.
According to the above purpose, it set up the following research topics:
1. What is the effect of Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered meditation activities on children's self-control?
2. What is the effect of Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered meditation activities on children's self-efficacy?
The subjects of this study are the two classes of 5 year olds in full in Kindergarten S. located in Sangju: 20 in experiment group to which this program was carried out and 20 in control group to which a general one was carried out.
The procedure of experiment included preparatory experiment, examiner training, preliminary examination, experiment handling and ex post examination and the period of the execution of the experiment was from September 7 to November 30, total 8 weeks, and the experiment group performed Buddhist meditation activities according to Buddhist early childhood education curriculum twice a week. The control group did existing kindergarten educational activities.
The scale used for measuring the children's self-control was the Self-Control Rating Scale(SCRS) developed by Kendall and Wilcox(1979) to assess children's self-control and adapted by Ji-hyun Choi(2000).
The tool used for measuring the children's self-efficacy was the ‘Children's Self-efficacy Examination’ by In-ok Jun(1996) to measure children's behaviors divided into cognitive, physical and socio-emotional fields and reused by Hye-kyung Jun(2008).
To examine the effect of Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered children's meditation activities on children's self-control and self-efficacy, it calculated the mean and standard deviation of the two examinations were calculated and carried out paired t-test for pre- and post-test of self-control of the experiment group to analyze the effect of the experiment and for ex post test of the experiment group and control group, it did an independent sample t-test. And, in the self-efficacy test, as a result of pre-test, there was a significant difference in the scores from the test between the experiment group and control group, so it carried out a covariance analysis taking the pre-test as co-variate.
The results of this study are as follows:
First, Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered meditation activities were proven to be effective for the improvement of children's self-control. To look at this by each subordinary area, in ‘control’ and ‘impulse’ areas, the experiment group improved statistically more than the control group.
Second, Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered meditation activities were proven to be effective for the improvement of children's self-efficacy. To look at this by each subordinary area, all ‘cognitive ability,’ ‘social, emotional ability’ and ‘physical area’ has been improved statistically.
To conclude this study based on these results, Buddhist early childhood education curriculum-centered meditation for children is effective for developing their self-control and self-efficacy.