POSITIVE SOCIALIZATION, ITS FOSTERING IN AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL GROUP THROUGH STORYTELLING AND COOPERATIVE PLAY

Positive socialization assumes attaining preventive skills which must be fostered in children; it refers to the set of helping the more vulnerable and concern for the others behaviors (Rudolph, 2000). It is important to foster these behaviors at school age since it is at this stage when students acquire them to benefit healthy coexistence and cooperation, as well as respect to the peers’ differences and diversity.

For this reason, an empirical qualitative applied field research was conducted, using a static comparison quasi-experimental design with a descriptive trans-sectional pretest (Campbell and Stanley, 2011). The objective was to foster positive socialization in a fourth grade elementary school group. The experimental group consisted of 10 male and 8 female students; and the control group by 16 male and 17 female students. The groups were static or intact as they were not randomly selected or matched, but already formed before the experiment (Hernandez Sampieri, Fernandez Collado and Baptista Lucio, 2014).

The Socialization Battery BAS-3 (Silva and Martorell, 1987), which establishes the child’s profile in terms of five factors, was used. The pretest results reflected that 77.77% of students in the experimental group scored under the theoretical mean value in two or more dimensions and 38.88% in three or more dimensions; as opposed to the control group, in which 36.66% of students scored two or more dimensions under the mean value and only 3.03% underscored in three or more dimensions. In addition, the experimental group teacher described it as one with aggressive behaviors among them and little inclusive.

Based on the pretest results, an intervention program was designed, grounded on a cooperative game proposal (Garaigordobil, 2004) and storytelling to foster prosocial and positive socialization behaviors in the experimental group.

At the end of the intervention, the postests were applied, the results proved that positive socialization significantly increased, especially the behaviors of concern for the others. In a non significant way:
(1) social leadership improved
(2) social retreat and anxiety/shyness decreased
(3) self control in social relationships decreased which is detrimental to positive socialization.

In the control group, there were no significant differences in behavior changes; however, the factors concern for the others, self control and social leadership, whereas retreat and anxiety/shyness increased, which undermine positive socialization.