This study was conducted to identify the relationship between the infant care teachers' perception of professionalism and the quality of infant daycare programs, and find out what factors influenced those two major dependent variables: That is, this s...
This study was conducted to identify the relationship between the infant care teachers' perception of professionalism and the quality of infant daycare programs, and find out what factors influenced those two major dependent variables: That is, this study aimed at finding out what teachers' demographic and professional characteristics, and what types of infant daycare centers had impacts on the teachers' perception of professionalism as well as on the quality of the programs. The results of the study would serve as basic data to boost the morale of professionalism for those who were working for infants and to improve the quality of such programs.
The hypotheses developed for this study were as follows:
Hypothesis 1: There would be a difference between the quality of infant daycare programs and teacher's demographic and professional variables such as age, working experiences in infant daycare programs, total years of teaching experiences in early childhood education, educational background, and the types of teacher qualifications.
Hypothesis 2: There would be a difference between teachers' perception of professionalism and teacher's demographic and professional variables Hypothesis 3: There would be differences between the types of infant daycare facilities and teachers' perception of professionalism as well as the quality of infant daycare programs.
Hypothesis 4: There would be a correlation between teachers' perception of professionalism and the quality of infant daycare programs.
A total of 250 questionnaires was initially distributed to teachers who were working at infant daycare centers, located both in Seoul and Gyunggi Province, which enrolled infants whose ages ranged from newborn up to the age of 2. Approximately 87 percent of them, or 218 questionnaires, was collected to be used as the data for this study. The tool that represented the quality of infant nurturing programs in this study was based on the Assessment Profile for Early Childhood Programs (APECP), developed by Abbott-Shim and Sibley (1987), and then translated into Korean and edited by Ghang Sook Hyun (1994) and Cho In Sook (1997). Furthermore, the study tool for teachers' perception of professionalism was based on two instruments used in previous studies: One was the tool that Lindsay & Lindsay (1987) developed in their study, which was then modified and edited by Lee Hyang (1996). The other tool was originally developed by Lee Soo Jung (1999) and Choi Hee Yang (2001). To be adapted to this study, both tools were modified and edited after a total of 8 infant care teachers and the directors of the centers reviewed the questionnaires.
Specifically, question items or terminology that were not clearly articulated or inappropriate for Korean culture were clarified.
The data collected were analyzed by the SPSS 11.0 package, after
having both coding and data cleaning processes completed. The data were analyzed to come up with frequency analyses for teachers' demographic and professional characteristics, their perception of professionalism, and the quality of infant daycare programs. Furthermore, one way ANOVA analysis and t-test were used to analyze teachers' perception of professionalism and the quality of infant daycare programs for each group. Finally, correlation analysis test was done to see if there were any correlations between teachers' perception of professionalism and the quality of infant daycare programs.
The results of the study were as follows:
First, as a result of the statistical analysis to see the relationship between the quality of the infant daycare programs and teachers' demographic and professional characteristics, there was a difference found between the quality of the programs and the teaching experiences of teachers in infant daycare programs as well as their educational background. More specifically, subcategories representing the quality of the programs that were shown to be statistically significant with such characteristics of the teachers included safety in health, interactions between teachers and infants, and educational activities and programs of infant daycare centers. The quality of infant nurturing programs appeared to be different by the types of qualifications teachers obtained: That is, infant programs that employed teachers who had the first-class early childhood teacher license appeared to be different from those with teachers having the second-class, which, especially, appeared to be statistically significant with such sub-factors of the quality of programs as educational programs of the infant daycare centers, and the interactions between teachers and infants.
Second, as far as the relationship between teachers' perception of professionalism and their characteristics was concerned, all of the teacher's characteristics, such as their age, working experiences in infant programs, total years of experiences as early childhood teachers, academic background, and the types of teacher qualifications, appeared to affect their perception of being early childhood professionals.
Third, Hypothesis 3 was tested to find out what types of facilities affect the quality of the programs and teachers' perception of being early childhood professionals. As a result, while there was a difference found between the quality of infant nurturing programs and the types of facilities, there was no statistical significance found in the relationship between the types of the facilities and the perception of professionalism among teachers.
Private facilities that received financial aids from incorporated firms or organizations appeared to have the best quality of the programs, followed by national or public facilities, and privately owned facilities without any financial assistances from outside. More specifically, such subcategories of the quality of the programs as physical environment, safety in health, and educational programs appeared to be statistically significant with the types of facilities.
Fourth, as far as the correlation between the perception of professionalism among the teachers and the quality of infant nurturing programs were concerned, there was a strong, positive correlation between those two variables found, which was statistically significant, as well.
In conclusion, hypotheses developed in this study were all tested to be true. In other words, the quality of infant daycare programs appeared to be affected by both teachers' characteristics and types of centers. Furthermore, infant care teachers were likely to have different view of professionalism as they had different age, academic background, experiences in early childhood education, and early childhood teacher's license. One of the most important findings in this study was that there was a strong, positive correlation between what teachers thought about their profession and the quality of the programs they actually worked, which implied that in order to improve the quality of infant daycare programs, infant care teachers should perceive themselves as positive, caring, and competent teachers.