• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.137-158
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• 2014

The present study aimed to develop an instrument to assess young children's understanding of science inquiry skills. For the purposes of the study, based on analysis of literature and evaluation tools related to young children's science inquiry skills, five categories of understanding science inquiry skills including observing, classifying, predicting, measuring, and discussing were selected. Then 30 test items were developed and verified three times through opinions from science education and early childhood education professionals and teachers. Finally, a total of 19 test items within five categories were developed. The 19 items' item difficulty, item discrimination, and item internal consistency were verified statistically. In addition, concurrent validity and test-retest reliability of the items were verified by the significant correlation coefficients. The instrument developed in this study was administered to 300 children who were 3, 4, and 5 years old. The results showed that 5 year old children had better competence to understand science inquiry skills than 4 and 3 year old children, while there were no differences in the competence between boys and girls.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.77-96
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among mother's psychological characteristics(self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression), parenting related factors(maternal parenting stress and mother's knowledge on infant development), maternal parenting style, and two-year-old infants' development. The participants consisted of 1735 mothers and their two-year old infants selected from a sample of the 3rd Panel Study of Korean Children(PSKC) by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education(KICCE), conducted in 2010. Data were analyzed by means of a Structural Equation Model(SEM) to identify the structure and relationships among the various factors. The significance of direct and indirect effects to test the mediating effect of maternal parenting style were identified via bootstrapping. The results indicated that maternal parenting style most definitely mediated the relationship among the mother's psychological characteristics(self-esteem and self-efficacy), parenting related factors(maternal parenting stress and mother's knowledge on Infant development) and the development of their two-year-old infants.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.155-167
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• 1998

The purpose of this study was to analyze the quality of the constructive play of 3, 4 and 5 year-old children. The researchers used unit blocks as the instrument because they are the most representative examples of constructive play materials. The subjects were 73 children enrolled in a half-day early childhood education program. The children's block play was videotaped 8 times, for a total of 330 minutes. The videotapes were transcribed and assessments were made on the children's 233 constructions in terms of the developmental stage of block play, the variety of materials used, play duration, and play intensity. The data were analyzed through two-way ANOVA to check age and sex differences. The results showed that children's developmental stages of block play were low on the average and that girls did not show an active interest in block play. The results also implied that block play developed by play experience rather than by age. Therefore, this study was interpreted to highlight the importance of teachers' understanding, planning, and mediation of block play in order to induce high-quality constructive play.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.123-137
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• 2002

This study investigated children's cognitions of physically impossible events by characteristics of the events. The 67 subjects were 3-, 5-, and 7-year old children from one day care center and one elementary school in Seoul. Children's responses to questions regarding the events were taped and transcribed. Cognition of the events was measured by recognition of impossibility, possibility of replication, and reasons for the possibility of replication of the events. Data were analyzed by ANOVA(repeated measures), and Pearson's correlation. Children's recognition of the impossibility of the events varied by type of task : Recognition of gravity tasks was different from irreversibility tasks, but there were no differences between recognition of irreversibility and gravity and between irreversibility and object permanence. The possibility of replication correlated significantly with reasons given by the children.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.39 no.11
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• pp.209-222
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• 2001

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations between mothers's and children's characteristics, maternal separation anxiety, and overprotective parenting with a sample of 212 mothers of 3-6 year-old children. The subjects reported maternal separation anxiety, children's initial temperament, their own experience in the childhood and personality, and overprotectiveness. The results indicated that 1) mothers who experienced higher parental acceptance showed higher maternal separation anxiety; 2) mothers who perceived that their children had avoidant temperament showed higher material separation anxiety; 3) mothers who showed higher separation anxiety reported higher overprotectiveness; 4) maternal separation anxiety played a mediating role in the relations between children's approach-avoidance temperament and mothers' sheltering behavior.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.79-85
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• 2019

This study examined the effects of a robotics curriculum based on "Bee-Bot" on the scientific problem-solving ability on 5-year-old children. A robotics curriculum was also designed to enhance their scientific problem-solving ability. This study examined a 4-week robotics curriculum was conducted 12 times for 4 weeks. For this study, 14 children in kindergarten A in Korea were set up as a treatment group and 18 children in kindergarten B in Korea as a control group. It was found that children in the treatment group who engaged in the robotics curriculum using "Bee-Bot" performed better on scientific problem-solving tests. This finding indicates that an enhanced planning experience using "Bee-Bot" was beneficial for improving young children's scientific problem-solving ability. The implications for designing appropriate curricula using "Bee-Bot" robots for kindergarteners are addressed.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.25-41
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between play behaviors and young children's playfulness in a variety of play space environments. The subjects were 150 4-year old children of 29 mixed-age classes in childcare centers of Seoul and Gyeonggi area. The results were as follows; (1) Their play behaviors differed according to their play environment in terms of classroom spaces. Solitary-active play behaviors were more frequently observed in large play spaces than small. (2) Leading participation, cognitive flexibility, voluntary full immersion, and total playfulness scores correlated negatively with reticent behavior. Leading participation, voluntary full immersion, and total playfulness scores, on the other hand, correlated positively with group play behavior. (3) In small play spaces, leading participation, voluntary full immersion correlated negatively with reticent behavior, but leading participation correlated positively with group play. In middle play spaces, cognitive flexibility correlated negatively with reticent behavior. In large play spaces, voluntary full immersion correlated negatively with parallel play, but leading participation, cognitive flexibility, expressions of joy, voluntary full immersion, and total playfulness score correlated positively with group play.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.147-161
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• 2008

The present study compared characteristics of Korean nominal particles (occurrence, error, error patterns) of ten 5- to 6-year-old Korean-English simultaneous bilingual children with ten Korean monolingual children. Data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman Rank Correlation and by qualitative analysis. Results were (1) bilingual children showed significantly lower frequency based on the number of occurrence of nominal particles per utterance. (2) The error percentage of adverbial markers was significantly higher for bilingual children. (3) Error patterns of bilingual children showed a higher percentage of in-case substitution and double use error. These findings suggest that Korean-English simultaneous bilingual children have a different Korean nominal particles development from Korean monolingual children.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.187-199
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• 2007

The relation of parents' emotion socialization to emotionality in their 5-year-old children was studied in 106 mothers and 105 fathers. They reported on their own family-related emotional expressiveness and on their children's negative emotions by questionnaires; mothers rated children on both positive and negative emotionality. Results showed that mothers expressed positive and negative emotions more frequently, and mothers showed more distress, expressive encouragement, and problem-focused reactions to children's negative emotions than fathers. Mothers' emotional expressiveness was related to children's emotionality, whereas only fathers' negative emotional expressiveness was related to children's negative emotionality. Mothers' distress and punitive reactions were associated with children's positive and negative emotionality. Mothers' problem-focused and emotion-focused and fathers' problem-focused reactions were associated with children's positive emotionality.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.157-174
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• 2008

This study used the person-oriented approach to explore differences in narrative representations of 97 4-, 5- and 6-year old children (30 foster care, 40 biological family, 17 adopted). Using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (Bretherton et al., 1990), observations were made to obtain children's narrative representations of content themes and performances. Descriptive statistics, ANOV A and hierarchical cluster analyses were performed. The results of this study were that : (1) Biological family children showed more empathy/helping representations. Foster care children and adopted children showed more anxious representations, and foster care children showed more dysregulated aggression. (2) Four clusters of foster care and adopted children and five clusters of family biological children were found.