The purpose of this paper is to investigate the general tendency of teacher-child relationship, young children's self regulation and peer competency and find out how they are related to each other. For this, a questionnaire survey has been conducted i...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the general tendency of teacher-child relationship, young children's self regulation and peer competency and find out how they are related to each other. For this, a questionnaire survey has been conducted in three categories (teacher-student relationship, young children’s self regulation, peer competency) against 115 young children and 29 teachers from 7 kindergartens in Chungju. For data analysis, frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation have been estimated to examine the socio-demographic background of the research objects. With regard to research problems, one-way ANOVA and the Pearson’s Correlation were performed.
As a result, this paper can be concluded as follows:
First, The participation / non-participation in a teacher training program and a teacher’s educational background had little impact on both teacher-student relationship and young children’s peer competency with no statistical significance. However, significant difference was only observed in emotionality, a sub factor of self regulation by a teacher’s educational background.
Second, teacher-student relationship showed significant difference in terms of closeness and dependency but non-significant difference in conflict depending on gender of children. In other words, female children were dependent and maintained positive relationship with teachers based on warm and open communication.
Third, young children’s self regulation revealed statistically significant difference in female children in terms of behavior inhibition, which means that female children are better than male children in following outer control, controlling behavior for better compensation and inhibiting negative emotions to observe internalized rules. Even though no statistically significant difference was detected, furthermore, female children were better than male children in self appraisal, self determination and emotionality. On the contrary, children’s self regulation showed substantial significant difference in terms of self monitoring (ex: self appraisal, self determination) depending on age, which shows the development of self monitoring, a meta-cognition process that has gone through the antecedent behavior of self regulation, self control.
Fourth, peer competency showed significant difference in terms of pro-sociality in sub domains and non-significant difference in sociality and leadership. Female children were higher than male children in terms of pro-sociality. In other words, the former was better than the latter in taking care of and getting along with peers and coping with conflict.
Lastly, it has turned out that the three categories (teacher-student relationship, young children’s self regulation, peer competency) are correlated with each other. When the teacher-student relationship was smooth and steady, children’s social competency improved, and their relationship with peers was good as well. The emotionality in self regulation, which refers to absence of self inhibition from the personal or dispositional perspectives showed negative correlation as variable that predicts pro-sociality and problematic behaviors.
Keywords: Teacher-student relationship, self-regulation, peer competence