Since the modern society is full of individualism and excessive competitiveness, the need for education caring for others gains more significance than over. Also, this kind of caring education must start from early childhood, which is the critical tim...
Since the modern society is full of individualism and excessive competitiveness, the need for education caring for others gains more significance than over. Also, this kind of caring education must start from early childhood, which is the critical time for development of personality. This study has its purpose in developing caring activity programs by using storybooks as a medium, and investigating how the activity has effect on self-esteem and pro-social behavior for four-year-old children, in order to make value objectives of the caring education as the specific one in child education fields.
For achieving the purpose of the study, the following research issues are established. First, do the caring activities through storybooks have effect on four-year-old children's prosocial behavior? Second, do the caring activities through storybooks have effect on self-esteem of the children?
In order to verify the issues above, two classes of four-year-old children from N day care center and J day care center are selected as objects of study respectively. The two groups are divided into experimental and control groups after identifying that they are the homogeneous under the preliminary inspection. By conducting that reading the same storybooks to both groups and not taking any measures to only control group, we exclude the possibilities of effect errors of reading storybooks, which can be caused in conducting to experimental group.
For the experiments, total 14 times caring activities from the second week in September to the last week of October in 2011 were conducted twice a week for seven weeks and each session lasted 25-30 minutes. The effect of the experiment was verified in prosocial behavior test and self-esteem inspection for the children in the two groups before and after the caring activities. The testing instrument used here was the same before and after the caring activities, and the data found in the research were statistically processed by using SPSS/WIN 19.0. We conducted t inspection and Welch-Aspirin Ancova pre-to-post inspection according to the data structure.
The findings the researchers acquired through the study are summarized as follows:
First, it is found that the child caring activities by using storybooks have effect on prosocial behavior of the four-year-old children. It is revealed that there are meaningful difference between experimental and control groups, and the experimental group has shown positive improvement in ability of personal emotional control and adaptability to educational institutions, except for ability of creating interpersonal relationships. The caring activities through storybooks, therefore, are shown to be effective in prosocial behavior of the four-year-old children.
Second, it is proved that the caring activities using storybooks give positive influence to the self-esteem of four-year-old children. After the activities of the experimental group, meaningful difference in both subdivisions of self-esteem. and the result of the verification of difference in the control group also shows meaningful distinctions. It can be known that cognitive, colleague-acceptance, and physical abilities, particularly are proved to have positive effect, and influence in accepting mother and increase of self acception are also affected affirmatively.
As we integrate the above findings, it is suggested that the caring activities utilizing storybooks have effect on enhancement of prosocial behavior which creates positive relationships with others, based on increase of positive self-understanding, so it can be used as strategy for educational activities in kindergarten. Also, this study has great significance in the fact that the study which can be applied to the four-year-old children, not like the most of precedent studies focusing on theoretical considerations of caring and elementary school students.