In this study, along with drawing representation activity, nature meditation, which help infants take a clean and deep look at their surrounding world and improve their sensibility and attention in a stable and clam state, was performed by infants. In...
In this study, along with drawing representation activity, nature meditation, which help infants take a clean and deep look at their surrounding world and improve their sensibility and attention in a stable and clam state, was performed by infants. In dosing so, this study was intended to investigate how such an activity affects infants' attention and creative drawing ability, and thus make the drawing representation activity with meditation as a fundamental material, which can be utilized as teaching-learning medium to improve infants' attention and creative drawing expression ability in general education sites.
The studies issues to achieve the purpose are presented as follows.
Study Issue 1. How does drawing representation activity with nature meditation affect infants' attention?
Study Issue 2. How does drawing representation activity with nature meditation affect infant's creative drawing expression?
To address the study issues, the following process was performed in this study.
The study subjects were 32 infants under 5 years old at K child care center in Songpa-gu. Seoul. They were divided into an experimental group of 16 infants and a control group of 16 infants.
With reference to 『Nature Meditation Program for the Education about Children Character. Soo-kyeong Lee(2008)』, 『Child Medication Games for the Improvement in Children's Creative Emotion and Attention. Sylvia Lendner-Fischer(2008)』, the program of drawing representation activity with nature meditation, reflecting infant's appeal, interest, and development level, was performed on the infants in the experimental group for eight weeks 20 times. The experimental group participated into the program for one hour 2-3 times a week. The infants in the control group participated into classes according to the integrated curriculum centering general subjects.
This study had been conducted from February 27 to May 11, 2012. It consisted of one-week preliminary study (Feb. 25 to Mar. 2), one-week prior-test (Mar.5 to 9), eight-week test treatment (Mar.12 to May 4), and one-week post-test (May 7 to 11).
For investigation of the effects of the program, Corbett (1988)'s Mr.CUCUI, which was used in the study on the relations between infants' attention and physical exercise by Yeon-Ju Oh and Bok-hee Cho (2001) after the change and supplementation of it, was used as a test tool for infants' attention in this study.
The test tool for creative drawing expression ability used in this study is based on what was used by Soo-kyeong Lee (2009), who chose common questions drawn from the creative expressions questions of Lorton, John, W, and Walley(1979)'s drawing representation, from the creative expression questions of Earl W, Linderman and Marlence M, Linderman(1982), and 「Introduction to Infants' arts」of Jeong-eu Kim, and 「Features of Infants' Drawings Full of Creativity」suggested by Research Institute of Education University, and then changed and supplemented them.
SPSS18.0 was used for analyzing the collected data. Also, to investigate whether drawing representation activity with nature meditation affected infants' attention and creative drawing expression ability, dependent t-test was conducted on prior-test score and post-test score.
The results and conclusions from this study are summarized as follows.
First, regarding infants' attention achievement, the infants of the experimental group who experienced drawing representation activity with nature meditation showed a higher mean than those who didn't. The mean difference showed that there was statistical significance. As a result, drawing representation activity with nature meditation is considered to positively affect development of infants' attention.
Secondly, regarding infants' creative drawing expression ability, the infants of the experimental group who experienced drawing representation activity with nature meditation showed a higher mean than those who didn't. The mean difference showed that there was statistical significance. Therefore, drawing representation activity with nature meditation is considered to positively affect infants' creative drawing expression ability.
This study results proved that drawing representation activity with nature meditation positively affected infants' attention and creative drawing expression ability. In this aspect, drawing representation activity with nature meditation can become a positive education tool to improve infants' attention and creative drawing expression ability. And, it is expected that the activity's effective value will become large in educational sites for infants.