The purpose of this study was to determine if commercially produced art and aesthetic education packages are quality products and if art and aesthetic education packages meet selected goals for art education. This study was limited to packages developed for preschool, kindergarten, and elementary children.To initiate the study, various avenues were explored in order to discover sources of commercially produced art and aesthetic education packages. A list of 72 publishers and suppliers of art and aesthetic education packages was compiled. From this list, a sample of 14 packages was selected.The first portion of the study pertained to the individual analysis of each package. To assess the packages comprising the sample, "An Instrument for the Assessment of Instructional Materials," developed by Maurice Eash (1972) was selected as the evaluation instrument. This instrument is divided into five sections: (a) objectives, (b) organization of material, (c) methodology, (d) evaluation, and (e) overall assessment.The second portion of the study pertained to the relationship of the package to the goals for art education. Various art educators have listed goals for art education; moreover, the goals listed by the National Art Education Commission on Art Education (1977) were selected as the goals to be used in this study.A group of trained evaluators assessed the individual packages. The findings revealed that only two packages received mean and median scores of 5.0 or higher on a rating scale of 1 through 7. This included the assessment of all five areas included in the evaluation instrument. The other 12 packages received mean and median scores of 2.5 or less on a rating scale of 1 through 7.In comparing the.packages to the goals for art education, two packages met all of the goals for art education. These two packages were the same ones which received the highest ratings on the evaluation instrument. Two other packages met two of the goals for art education. All of the other packages met only one of the goals for art education. The majority of the packages met one of two goals, either "art education as a means of developing creative and flexible forms of thinking" or "art education as a means of helping students understand and appreciate art."

The present research investigates the causal influence of phonological awareness and oral language proficiency on beginning reading and spelling development of Chinese kindergarteners learning English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Three inter-related studies using correlational and intervention design were conducted to examine (1) the role of phonological awareness in English reading and spelling; (2), the contribution of oral language proficiency to English reading and spelling; (3), the efficacy of the phonological awareness instruction led by kindergarten teachers in classroom settings, and (4) the cross-language associations of metalinguistic skills and reading between English and Chinese. In Study 1, 50 children from two Hong Kong ESL kindergartens were assessed on measures of general intelligence, English and Chinese phonological awareness, English and Chinese oral language proficiency, and English word reading. With age and general intelligence statistically controlled, both English oral language proficiency and English phonological awareness (phoneme awareness) accounted for unique additional variance in English word reading. In Study 2, the effects of phonological awareness instruction were examined on 59 children from two local kindergartens. The phonological awareness instruction, which taught syllable awareness and rhyme awareness, was compared to a treated control group. The instructional programme was able to enhance phonological awareness skills at the rhyme level but not at the syllable level. Word reading was not significantly different between the instructional group and the comparison group during the posttest. The results suggest that instructional programme that solely focuses on phonological awareness skills might not be able to enhance reading skills of Hong Kong Chinese ESL children. Study 3 investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young ESL kindergarteners. The children were randomly assigned to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or a comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on oral language skills, phonological awareness at varied levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest. In addition, regression analyses on both pretest and posttest data showed that phonological awareness (phoneme awareness) and oral language proficiency (expressive vocabulary) are significant predictors of English reading and spelling. Cross-language transfers of phonological awareness were found. The present research suggests that both phonological awareness, particularly phoneme awareness, and oral language proficiency (expressive vocabulary) play a causal influence on English reading and spelling among Chinese ESL children. The efficacious language-enriched phonological awareness instruction indicates that kindergarten teachers with sufficient training and support are able to implement instruction that aims to teach phonological awareness directly and explicitly. The significant cross-language associations suggest that phonological sensitivity is a common competence that children need to acquire in learning to read two writing systems. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

This present study examined the relationship among behavioural regulation, early language development and early mathematics skills. Participants were 111 children ranging in age from 4 to 5 years attending kindergarten participating in the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme in Hong Kong. Behavioural regulation was assessed directly with the Head-to-Toe task which requires the children to perform the opposite of the instructed command. Receptive and expressive language ability, and mathematics skills will be assessed by the Pre-primary and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale (PPCLS) Test A, a verbal fluency test, and a mathematics competency test respectively. There was a positive correlation between behavioural regulation ability and background variables such as age, father’s education level and prior years of early childhood education. Significant correlations between behavioural regulation and early receptive and expressive language and mathematics skills were also demonstrated. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Over the years, many studies have been shown that storytelling plays a significant role in vocabulary acquisition (Speaker, Taylor, & Kamen, 2004). My research focused on vocabulary development in native and bilingual English speaking kindergartners through storytelling. Findings from this study of storytelling that revealed a positive relationship between the number of occurrences to words in the story and the vocabulary development as well as the positive relationship between the numbers of exposures to the storybooks and the vocabulary development are presented. Findings also confirmed that older kindergartners acquired more new vocabulary compared with the younger group kindergartners. The kindergartners who were all non readers listened to stories over a two week period by a professional storyteller. The kindergartners listened to the first story only once in the first week and completed a multiple-choice vocabulary posttest immediately thereafter. This test included 5 unfamiliar words from the story. The second storybook was read twice in the following week, two days apart and a multiple-choice vocabulary posttest with a different set of 5 unfamiliar words was presented after the second time the story was read. Three weeks after this, a delayed posttest with the 10 words were administered. There were 10 target words throughout the 2 stories. Only one target word appeared in both stories, once in Story 1 and twice in Story 2. Likewise, 4 target words appeared once in Story 1 and the other set of 4 target words appeared once in Story 2. There was 1 target word (not heard word) which had not read to the kindergartners in each of the story. As expected, the scores on the second multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was higher than the first multiple-choice vocabulary posttest because children vocabulary acquisition increased with the numbers of the exposures to story and the number of occurrences to words in the story. Nevertheless, storytelling would have no benefits on children’s vocabulary acquisition if words were not being delivered or told to the children, whereas the number of occurrences of the story read increased. Findings in the present study proved that reading the same story at least twice and more exposures to words contributed the positive influence to kindergartners’ vocabulary growth. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

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toc / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Recent research in phonological awareness found a strong link between rhyming ability in preschool children and later reading achievement. The use of orthographic analogy, the ability to make inferences from similarities in spelling to similarities in sound, was proposed as the mechanism to explain this relationship (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Literature was presented that suggested the need for further research. Four research questions were examined. First, can prereaders learn to read unfamiliar words on the basis of orthographic analogy after brief training with rhyming words? The evidence supported the view that they could. Second, will the ability to read words by orthographic analogy be enhanced by phonological training in onset and rime, and by the use of segmented text? The brief phonological training did not increase analogy word reading over the same training without it. However, using text segmented at the onset-rime boundary for training items did increase analogy word reading. Third, will reading by orthographic analogy vary according to the level of prereading skills (rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge)? The majority of children with high prereading skills learned to read analogy test words whereas most children with low prereading skills found the task too arduous. Fourth, will rhyming ability make an independent contribution to reading achievement? The results were equivocal. Rhyming ability did make an independent contribution to the number of trials taken to learn the training items. It did not when analogy word reading was the dependent variable. Phoneme identity accounted for most of the variance in analogy word reading. Further analyses found that the ability to identify the final phoneme was the best discriminator between children who learned to read analogy test words and those who did not. A possible explanation was that children used the final phoneme to determine the sound of the rime ending rather than the last two phonemes together.

This field study of two-year-old children using art materials in a preschool setting was concerned with how children constructed meaning about the art-making process through their interactions with others. The study was theoretically grounded in the work of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer and Lev Vygotsky, who share a common view that meaning is socially constructed through interpersonal interactions. The study focused on children’s early use of art media and their social interaction as a significant factor in their artistic expression. Monthly videotaped and written observations documented four 2-year-aids’ participation with art media during their attendance at weekly parent-2-year old program. Over two subsequent years, the data were expanded to include observations of additional 2- year-aids, and parent and teacher interviews. Observations in a 3 and 4-year-old classroom coupled with extensive teacher interviews provided insights into teachers’ assumptions and values which guided their interactions. Observations of the 2-year-olds were coded into art episodes, and analyzed in terms of behaviours, interactions, and values. Based on Vygotsky’s idea that children’s shift from biological development to higher cognitive functioning occurs through interpersonal interaction, children’s exploratory use of materials was described. Analysis of their explorations revealed that intentionality and visual interest were crucial components in their art experiences. Analysis suggested that children as young as 2 years possess aesthetic sensitivity. There did not appear to be any single factor that could account for children’s selection or placement of colors or marks on a piece of paper. Social interactions around art-making occurred within spatial-temporal frames which contributed to the way the art-making context was defined by the participants. Through interpretations derived from interactions with peers and adults, children constructed understanding about cultural values for work, production, ownership, and neatness. They learned little about art skills or the relationship of their art-making experiences to art in the adult world. The study concludes with presentation of an interactionist model of children’s artistic expression which describes the dialectical relationship between biological development and social interaction. The model eliminates the need to debate issues around innate or cultural origins of children’s visual expression, through its inclusion of biological and social components. Using the interactionist model and Vygotsky’s notion of scaffolding can help teachers address conflicts surrounding the definition of developmentally appropriate art education for young children.

The main purpose of this study is to present a detailed description of the interaction between students and teacher, focusing on which literary elements kindergarteners learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) respond to during the story-reading sessions. Two teachers and a total of 101 kindergarteners from a private kindergarten located in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, were chosen for this study. Both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered in the form of classroom observations and student and teacher interviews. This analysis revealed that format was the literary element that students responded to the most. However, factors such as the variance in the students' cognitive level, age, exposure to the target language, teaching method and personality may have affected the results. Consequently, teachers need to take into consideration other literary elements when it comes to storybook selection. Results from this study can be used firstly in developing criteria on how to select storybooks for young EFL learners and how these storybooks can be integrated into the EFL classroom. Secondly, this study can provide information to help further our understanding of how stories motivate children in learning languages, and how stories can be integrated into the EFL classroom. Thirdly, the data from this study can be useful to writers and illustrators of children's books. Finally, it is hoped that this project can also inspire other researchers in pursuing this topic for further study.

The engaged classroom is a space where teacher and students come together to share in the acts of teaching and learning. They embark on a collaborative journey of empowerment and through the process reciprocally influence each other's growth and emancipation. / Through an autobiographical exploration of my experiences as a student and as a teacher, I present an exploration of the concept of empowerment. I explore its significance not only on the level of literacy development in my kindergarten classroom, where I teach French in an Armenian heritage language setting, but also on a more personal and professional level. Working in the theoretical framework of teacher self-study, I present an epistemological exploration of postmodern feminist research paradigms and discuss the various aspects of autobiographical research. I build my thesis on the context of the heritage language school and the critical analysis of my past experiences. I present an account of the reflexive process I have engaged in during the past five years, which, coupled with the theories of critical and feminist pedagogy, has brought forth the main thesis of my dissertation: the interconnectivity of teacher and student empowerment. In the hope of providing some practical material, I include an appendix where I describe a collection of literacy activities from my kindergarten classroom. / My work provides insight into a teacher's journey of meaning-making and empowerment, which will, I hope, be useful as part of a larger exploration of teachers' work and students' experiences in classrooms.