The purpose of this study was to examine how cooperative games affected social interaction between disabled and non-disabled children in integrated education setting, whether or not cooperative games brought any changes to their social interaction and...
The purpose of this study was to examine how cooperative games affected social interaction between disabled and non-disabled children in integrated education setting, whether or not cooperative games brought any changes to their social interaction and whether or not their effects remained unchanged.
The research questions were posed as below:
1. What change do a cooperative game program bring to disabled young children's interactive behavior toward non-disabled preschoolers?
2. What change do a cooperative game program bring to non-disabled children's interactive behavior toward disabled preschoolers?
The subjects in this study were six preschoolers who attended a kindergarten affiliated to an elementary school in the city of Changweon. Out of them, three who suffered from Down's syndrome were in a special class, and the other children were in a regular class.
The instrument used in this study to observe their social interaction was Jeong Gue-suk and Jeong In-suk(1996)'s adapted version of Brown, Odom and Holcomb(1996)'s Inventory. The young children's behaviors were classified into two: starting and reactive ones, and pretest, posttest and retention test were implemented. A cooperative game prorgram was implemented in 16 sessions for four weeks, three times a week.
All the test results were analyzed to find out the frequency of social interaction between the two groups, and whether or not each of the test brought any significant changes was investigated. And the data on the effects of each behavioral strategy and each child's changes were graphed.
The findings of the study were as follows:
First, the cooperative game program served to increase all the disabled young children's social interaction with the non-disabled children. Specifically, Child A made a lot of progress in starting behavior frequency, and Child B showed more reactive behaviors.
Second, the cooperative game program let all the non-disabled children share more social interaction with the disabled preschoolers. Children D and E showed more positive reactive behaviors, and Child F showed frequent starting behaviors even in the pretest.
Third, as for their social interaction during the retention period, the social interaction frequency of the disabled preschoolers was lower than that in the late intervention period, but relatively higher than that in pretest. The non-disabled preschoolers showed some increase in social interaction during that period, though there were individual variances.
Based on the above-mentioned findings, it could be concluded that the cooperative game program was effective in fueling the non-disabled young children's social interaction with the disabled preschoolers and the latter group's social interaction with the former in integrated early childhood education setting. Earlier studies have focused on identifying the effects of cooperative games on non-disabled preschoolers, and the effort by this study made a more extensive approach to cooperative games by applying them to both disabled and non-disabled young children.