The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age on their mathematical concept and language comprehension ability, and then provide basic data on the activat...
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age on their mathematical concept and language comprehension ability, and then provide basic data on the activation of traditional play-related storytelling teaching-learning method-utilized mathematical activity, which is appropriate for the developmental characteristic of young children, to the actual scene of education.
For this, following two study questions were established:
First, ‘What effect does traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age have on their mathematical concept (algebra, number & operation, geometry and measurement)?’
Second, ‘What effect does traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age have on their language comprehension ability?’
Study subjects were 40 children of 3 years age, sampled from two classes of J Kindergarten, Seoul and 20 of them were distributed in an experiment group (11 boys and 9 girls) and another 20 of them in a control group (12 boys and 8 girls).
Following tools were used: (1) in order to test the effect of traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age on their mathematical concept, ‘The Pictorial Mathematical Ability Test for Young Children’, developed by Hwang Hae-ik & Choe Hye-jin (2007) and consisted of 4 sub-areas (algebra, number & operation, geometry and measurement), was used; and (2) in order to test young children’s language comprehension ability, the scoring method of the language comprehension ability test tool, which was developed by Jang Yeong-ae (1981) according to the level of young children, modified and supplemented by Kang Nam-hee (2010), and used by Hwang Ju-yeon (2011), was used.
20 sessions of traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age were carried out for 10 weeks from October 6 to December 12, 2014, twice a week. A pre-test was carried out to examine the homogeneity of both experiment and control groups. Both groups did not present significant difference in the tests of pictorial mathematical ability and language comprehension ability, and therefore they were regarded as homogeneous.
In order to examine the effect of traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age on their mathematical concept and language comprehension ability, a pre-test and a post-test were carried out. Collected data were analyzed using the SPSS 20.0 statistical program, thus calculating the mean scores and standard deviation of two groups and comparatively analyzing the difference of effect of two groups using independent sample t-test.
Study findings are as follows:
First, as for the difference of effect on young children’s mathematical concept between two groups, the result of post-test presented statistically significant difference in all the areas of mathematical concept. In other words, children in the experiment group who carried out traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity presented higher scores in such sub-areas of mathematical concept as algebra, number & operation, geometry and measurement than those in the control group did. This result seems to suggest that traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age is effective in the improvement of their mathematical concept.
Second, as for the difference of effect on young children’s language comprehension ability between two groups, the result of post-test presented statistically significant difference. In other words, children in the experiment group who carried out traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity presented higher scores in language comprehension ability than those in the control group did. This result seems to suggest that traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age is effective in the improvement of their language comprehension ability.
Therefore, this study’s traditional play-related storytelling mathematical activity for children of 3 years age is an effective teaching-learning method for the improvement of young children’s mathematical concept and language comprehension ability. The author hopes it is used actively in the actual scene of young child education.