| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
The aim of this study is to design and evaluate the Voices of Love and Freedom (VLF) program (Selman, 1995) in its capacity as a moral program for encouraging Japanese children to promote social competencies such as social perspective-taking, conflict-resolution skills, and empathy. This program seeks to develop children's capacity for healthy interpersonal relationships and to decrease their negative behavior among children through activities that promote social skills, such as telling, reading, discussing, listening, writing, and role-playing.
During 1999-2000, subjects in a kindergarten and an elementary school participated in this study. The subjects consisted of kindergarten pupils and elementary school children from the first to sixth grade. Two kinds of questionnaires assessing social skills and a social support scale were administered to the elementary school children. Kindergarten pupils were given another form of the questionnaires administered to elementary school children. T
… More
hey used verbal instructions and animal illustrations developed for younger children to assess their social skills and empathy. Children were administered these questionnaires both before and after VLF.Subjects had classes dealing with the following four steps of the VLF program, step1 (to connect), step2 (to discuss), step3 (to practice), and step4 (to express). Elementary school children experienced all four steps at a pace designed according to their attention span. The Kindergartners experienced two steps a day.
The results showed that this program had an effect on social competence on all the children. The change in scores from the pre-test to the post-test was significant in the experimental kindergarten class. The social skill's score in the experimental classes were significantly higher than ones in the control classes in all the grades of elementary school. The children who had some communicative problems had shown growth in the developmental level and their social competence had progressed. Less
|
