The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of character education activity based on emotion expression on young children’s self-esteem and development of theory of mind. To achieve this purpose, the study questions were established as follo...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of character education activity based on emotion expression on young children’s self-esteem and development of theory of mind. To achieve this purpose, the study questions were established as follows:
First, what is the effect of character education activity based on emotion expression on young children’s self-esteem?
Second, what is the effect of character education activity based on emotion expression on young children’s mind theory development?
The subjects selected for the study were 36 children (18 for experimental group and 18 for comparative group) in a private kindergarten located in A province. The mean age of the subjects was 50.55 months. The subjects belonged to a homogeneous group with the same sociocultural backgrounds.
In order to measure self-esteem of children, the research tool was used from existing 50 question test tool developed by Ji Seong-ae, Kim Young-ok and Park Hui-suk (2003), which were later modified and supplemented by Ji Seong-ae and Kim Seung-hee (2010) and abstracted to a 40 question test tool. And to measure children’s theory of mind, it was used that ‘Mind Theory Task’ which includes ‘Content Replacement Task’ by Taylor and Carlson (1997), ‘Location Assignment’ by Carlson and Moses (2001) and ‘Second-Order False Belief Task’ by Lee Young-ja, Lee Jong-suk and Shin Eun-su (2002).
Children in the experimental group began with character education activity based on emotion expression while children in the comparative group began with character education activity based on teacher–children discussion.
16 experimental treatments were conducted twice a week for a total of 8 weeks from October 25th, to December 15th, 2016. The data collected through the pre- and post-test from experimental and comparative groups were analyzed using statistics program SPSS 20.0. Independent sample t-test and covariance analysis (ANCOVA) were conducted.
First it was found that character education activity based on emotion expression was effective in enhancing children’s self-esteem. Specifically, it was found that there was statistically significant difference in social self, physical self, and emotional self, which are sub-factors of self-esteem between the experimental group having character education activity based on emotion expression and the comparative group having character education activity based on teacher–children discussion. These results suggest that character education activity based on emotion expression have a positive effect on the self-esteem of young children.
Second, Character education activity based on emotion expression have a positive effect on promoting children's mind theory development. Specifically, there was statistically significant difference in the content replacement task area which is a sub-area of mind theory between the experimental group and the comparative group.
Conclusively, it was found that while reading a fairy tale and experiencing the concrete personality virtues such as 'sharing', 'order' and 'cooperation' they identify themselves as characters in the fairy tale and character education activity based on emotion expression such as joy, sorrow, happiness, anger and fear made significant effects on self-esteem and mind theory of children. This suggests that character education activity based on emotion expression is effective by presenting concrete ways to plan and operate children’s character education activity in the field.