The problems related to individualism, egoism, self-control problem, and lack of cooperation were appeared in current modern society because there is shortage of the personal relation experience. This phenomenon was arisen by expansion of nuclear fami...
The problems related to individualism, egoism, self-control problem, and lack of cooperation were appeared in current modern society because there is shortage of the personal relation experience. This phenomenon was arisen by expansion of nuclear family system and development of televisions and computers. To solve these problems, the importance of cooperation among many plans was stood out. The cooperation is not only useful technique but also chapter of the integrated learning.
For young children, controlling their emotions in the process to perform cooperative activities between peers and having the opportunity to interact with others are the foundation for social adaptation and the essence for desirable socialization processes. Young children share knowledge and experience, which they can’t get from parents or teachers, with peers. The cooperation is achieved by forming and maintaining relations through physical activities. Therefore, the importance of physical activity is more highlighted. Physical activity is not simply moving their bodies. It navigates the environment and forming relationships with others, and may interact in space. Physical activities develop individually or large groups. However, physical activities also can be applied through small group activities to find out how young children form social relationship with others by cooperative.
Thus, young children experience interacts with peers in variety of situations through cooperative physical activities. These activities are emphasized the factor of cooperation among physical activities which are conducted in the early childhood education field. These activities also affect positively to improve the competence of peer relations and self-control ability.
This study suggested the importance of peer cooperative physical activities by researching the effects of peer competence and self-control ability for young children. The subjects of this study were 4 year old young children who have experience of peer cooperative physical activities in early childhood education.
The research questions through this study are like following.
1. What was the effect of the peer cooperative physical activity affect on the peer competence of young children?
2. What was the effect of the peer cooperative physical activity affect on the self-control ability of young children?
The subjects of this study are 4 year old young children. The experimental group is 19 young children from S preschool at D county in Busan, Korea. The comparison group is 17 young children from C preschool in same district.
To measure the peer competence of young children, the peer competence screening tool was used. This tool was made by Joohee Park and Eunhae Lee(2001) for young children. To measure the self-control ability, the Self-Control Rating Scale was used. This questionnaire was developed by Kendall and Wilcox(1979) and modified and revised by Haejung Yoo(1998), Jihyung Lee(2001), Jiah Kim(2002), Sooki Lee(2005), and Jungae Lee(2010).
This study was conducted from September 5th to December 23rd for 16 weeks in the order of teachers training, preliminary study, preliminary test, experimental treatment, and post-test. In experimental treatment, experimental groupconducted peer cooperative physical activity and control group conducted individual physical activity for twice per week, 13 weeks and total 20 times.
In this study, the mean and standard deviation of experimental group and comparison group in pre-test were conducted by independent sample t-test. In post-test, to improve accuracy of experiment, the covariance analysis (ANCOVA) was carried out by using pre-test scores in both groups as covariate and post-test scores as dependent variables. Statistical analysis of collected data wasanalyzed by using PASW 18.0.
Results of this study were as follows.
First, peer cooperation and physical activities affected positively to peer competence and sociability which was sub-element of peer competence for young children. It seemed to provide opportunity to build up peer relations to have an experience of having good relations between young children for common goals by moving bodies.
Second, peer cooperation and physical activity seemed to influence positively for young children to develop self-control ability and self-regulation, temptation, and attention which are sub-elements of all areas. When problems occurred while young children were doing activities with peers, they had opportunity to experience the process to accept the result without anger or excitement. They also had a chance to experience the process of cooperation in cooperative attitude and rules and it affected to develop of self-control ability.