Creativity is one of the most critical and active attributes of human beings to cope with in the rapidly changing global society. Since creativity appears to be responsible for every aspect of our challenging lives, the demand for teaching and fosteri...
Creativity is one of the most critical and active attributes of human beings to cope with in the rapidly changing global society. Since creativity appears to be responsible for every aspect of our challenging lives, the demand for teaching and fostering young children to be a creative person has never been higher. Children can, therefore, deal with dramatic changes of our contemporary society and become a leader of next generation in knowledge based society.
During the early childhood period, young children are at peak of the most sensitive stage to develop their creative abilities. During this period, picture-books are the first art crafts that play a critical role in stimulating young children's imagination since a picture-book itself serves as a product of magnificent imagination. Not only picture-books themselves serve as the product of imagination for young children, but also they provide valuable and fundamental materials for developing young children's creativity. In this context, it would be a significant research attempt to develop and implement an art education program for young children based on using picture-books and to investigate its effects on children's creativity.
The purpose of this study was, therefore, to develop the Arts Education Program with Picture-books(AEPPB) for young children and examine its effects, and, on the basis of the research results, to design Rubrics for verifying their reliability and validity to see if it was an effective tool to measure creativity in young children.
This study divided into two parts: Studies I and II. In StudyⅠ, the AEPPB was designed and developed based on the contents of the 6th National Kindergarten Curriculum developed and distributed from the Ministry of Education and Human Resources in Korea, existing arts education programs for young children, and Arts PROPEL which was developed by Winner and his associates(1991) and featured an entire process from perception, to production, and to reflection, derived from multiple intelligence theory. The AEPPB in this study included educational programs for music, fine arts, and literature. Picture-books was the primary medium for instruction. Afterwards, this program was applied to a preschool classroom to examine its effect on children's creativity for arts.
Furthermore, in StudyⅡ, Rubrics, one of the performance assessment tools, were designed as a tool for assessing young children's creativity in arts, specifically including language, music, fine arts, and body expression, and their reliability and validity were verified through the analysis of interrelations with the K-CCTYC, MCSM, and KK-MIDAS, for creativity.
The AEPPB developed in Study I mainly had two sub-purposes: First, it aimed at providing young children with pleasurable learning experiences by identifying the magnitude and diversity of art contents in picture books through reading words as well as pictures, and understanding the relationships between them. Second, this program offered young children opportunities so that they could express their experiences of various art areas creatively through self-elaboration and actual production activities. Third, through this program, young children were able to present their works of art in a more creative way as a result of revising and modifying through assessment and reflection processes.
This study was experimentally designed. The subjects of this study were as many as 111 young children resided in Seoul and Kyonki Provincial areas. The subjcts were divided into two groups: The experimental and the control groups. As many as 61 young children in experiment group were scheduled to participated in the AEPPB who had various instructional activities with picture books, while 50 children in the control group had the existing program. Children in both groups had participated in the experiment for 10 weeks. K-CCTYC, a test for creativity in language, fine art, and body expression, as well as MCSM, a test for creativity in music were administrated as the pre- and the post-tests.
The research findings of Study I showed that the AEPPB was effective in enhancing young children's creativity in such subject areas as language, fine arts, body expression, and music. The results of K-CCTYC and MCSM tests revealed that the pretests did not show any differences between the two groups, while the post tests showed that the experimental group demonstrated higher scores on creativity in all four areas of language, fine art, body expression, and music, which indicated statistically significant.
When Rubrics were designed for Study II, two activities were selected from each instructional area of language, fine arts, body expression, and music in the AEPPB.
The study results of Study II on the validity and reliability of the Rubrics were as follows: First, for the agreement between/among raters, the reliability estimates(Cronbach alpha) of Rubrics were·93,·88,·79,·87 for language, fine arts, body expression, and music, respectively. For inter-consistency, the reliability estimates (Cronbach alpha) were·91,·81,·71,·77 for language, fine arts, body expression, and music, respectively. This results demonstrated that the Rubrics were seen to be a valid tool to measure the creativity in every instructional area. In addition, the result of face validity of Rubrics for one expert and 3 teachers in each area demonstrated the Rubrics as the valid tool. There were positive interrelations found in the concurrent validities of Rubrics with K-CCTYC, MCSM, and KK-MIDAS, each of which showed a higher level of validity.
In sum, this results confirmed that Rubrics served as a valid and reliable tool to assess young children's creativity in various subject areas. In addition, this study confirmed that children's creativity could be increased by a wide range of picture-book reading skills. Another contribution of this study was that, through actual development and implementation of an integrated arts education program for young children with picture-books, this study attempted to come up with the operational definition of creativity as an domain-specific construct, along with establishing Rubrics as a valid and reliable tool to measure young children's creativity. These results will provide a guideline for teachers and educators to be able to understand what influence creativity in young children and how to utilize effective methods for enhancing creativity.