The major focus of this study is to identify the effect of teacher's verbal expression on children's learning during the free-play period. The verbal expression of teachers was identified as a form of the adult's reinforcement of the child's performance during the free-play period. This reinforcement of the primary learnings which are the children's on-going activities, lead to the elaboration of learning into associate and concomitant learnings. Fifty four-year-old children in ten classrooms were selected and observed. The Child Activity Observation Form designed for 40 minute observations and adapted from Day and Weinthaler (1982) was used to collect the data. A videotape of two classrooms was used for training twelve teachers for inter-observer reliability. The researcher and the twelve teachers observed the tapes and recorded observations. The observation results were correlated with each other to identify the percentage of agreement amongst the thirteen observers. The percentage agreement for all variables was calculated for the activities observed. Findings indicate average percentage agreement amongst variables in two activities ranged between 84% and 94%. SPSS/PC+V.3.1--Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (1988) was used to analyze the data. Contingency table analysis was used, which showed the frequency distribution and crosstabulations. The analysis of the results indicate that there was no significant difference between teacher and child on "who initiated activities." The teacher initiated in 61 activities while the child initiated in 53 activities. In looking at the effect of teacher interaction on the child's achievement of elaborated learnings, results revealed significant differences in the roles of the teacher and the frequencies of both associate and concomitant learnings. Results show that teachers were observing in 43 percent of all the activities, directing in 28.9 percent, participating in 17.5 percent and absent in 10.5 percent. There was no observed associate learnings in 61.4 percent of all activities and no observed concomitant learnings in 57.0 percent of all activities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8242 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| Creators | Ihedigbo, Rose Ijeoma |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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