Cooking activities are an educational process that combines various areas of education such as language, physics, math, science, and society; as such, they are of great educational value to children. To this end, this study analyzes the effects of coo...
Cooking activities are an educational process that combines various areas of education such as language, physics, math, science, and society; as such, they are of great educational value to children. To this end, this study analyzes the effects of cooking activities on children's scientific inquiry competencies, namely observing, classifying, measuring, predicting and discussing.
80 5-year-old (61 month old -72 month old) children from H and O Kindergartens located in S City in Gyeongnam Province were selected to take part in this study. Home to two kindergartens, S City is a small-sized city. The parents of the children that attend these kindergartens mostly hail from the middle class, and share a common social and economic status. Experimental and comparative groups consisting of 40 children each were established. The experimental group carried out the cooking activities.
The Scientific Inquiry Competence Test Tool developed by Lee Gyeong-min (2000), which was itself a modified and supplemented version of the inquiry competence evaluation scale and assessment criteria developed by Martin (1996), was used to measure the children's scientific inquiry competencies.
The results of the study can be summarized as follows.
First, cooking activities were found to effectively improve children's scientific inquiry competencies such as predicting, observing, classifying, measuring and discussing.
Second, while cooking activities helped improve children's scientific inquiry competencies, no gender specific differences were recorded.
The above study results show that the participation of children in cooking activities can effectively influence their scientific inquiry competencies. In this regard, the conclusion is reached that the scientific thinking of children can be further developed through the active use of cooking activities as a part of science education programs.