The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of personality program with picture books on young children's sympathizing ability and pro-social behavior. With this purpose, the research questions were selected as follows:
First, what is th...
The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of personality program with picture books on young children's sympathizing ability and pro-social behavior. With this purpose, the research questions were selected as follows:
First, what is the purpose and contents of the personality program with picture books?
Second, what effects does the personality program with picture books have on young children's sympathizing ability?
Third, what effects does the personality program with picture books have on young children's pro-social behavior?
With these research questions in consideration, the research was performed with the procedure below.
The subjects were forty 5-year-old children from B district of Gwangju city.
The experimental group's twenty children were given the experimental treatment; they read picture books including personality virtues and engaged in the personality program. The control group's twenty children read the same picture books but were freely left in the reading zone without the personality program. To collect the data, questionnaires were given to the teachers of the experimental and control groups to check the conditions of the children.
The tool of measuring the children's sympathizing ability was the index of sympathizing ability, first developed by Bryant(1982), re-created by Yeon(1987), further modified by Kim(2010) into the questioning format in which the teacher questions the children and the children answer to that. The picture cards of Kang(2010) were used along with it, modified and supplemented by the researcher. The index of sympathizing ability consists of four factors: sadness, mental burden, joy, and anxiety. To examine the children's pro-social behavior, the Pro-social Behavior Scale for Young Children by Kim(2003) was employed, which has seven factors: leadership, helping, communication, concern, proximity, sharing, and empathy.
The data were analyzed with SPSS WIN 21.0 Program. To verify the equality of the experimental and control group, the researcher calculated the mean and standard deviation of each group and employed t-test. To verify the effects after the experimental treatment, the researcher calculated the mean and standard deviation of each group and analyzed the difference between the post-test scores of them by t-test.
The conclusion of this research is as follows:
First, the purpose of the personality program is to help the children to improve the sympathizing ability, with which they can understand and concern other people's feelings, and improve the pro-social behavior, in order to understand the child himself or herself as well as concern and respect other people and foster the ability to live together with them. Thus the personality program with picture books provide young children with various opportunities to learn, emotional stability, and promotion of positive development. The program was designed to allow them to practice the aspects of personality themselves, with phased teaching method to enhance sympathizing ability and pro-social behavior.
Second, in the result of verifying the sympathizing ability of the experimental group after performing the personality program with picture books, the experimental group which had the personality program had better overall sympathizing ability(sadness, mental burden, joy, and anxiety), compared to the control group which did not have the personality program. Therefore, this research proved that the personality program with picture books was effective to the sympathizing ability.
Third, in the result of verifying the pro-social behavior of the experimental group after performing the personality program with picture books, the experimental group which had the personality program had better overall sympathizing ability(leadership, helping, communication, concern, proximity, sharing, and empathy), compared to the control group which did not have the personality program. Therefore, this research proved that the personality program with picture books was effective to the pro-social behavior.