Abstract:

In Hungary, the issue of early intervention at kindergarten age is gaining increasing popularity, since developmental differences appear at the end of kindergarten and at the beginning of school. The differences can be measured in years. Special educational needs teachers are generally employed by kindergartens, but these professionals only organise developmental sessions for children with developmental disorders, while other such sessions are led by kindergarten teachers for their own groups and are addressed to the whole group. These activities form part of everyday teaching.

The main objective of the present research is to describe concept mapping-based intervention programmes designed for pre-school children and embedded in everyday teaching. The presentation places the main emphasis on providing a description of children’s and teachers’ activities during the projects. The framework for the programme was based on the theory of the project method (e.g. Bell, 2010; Habók, 2007; Habók & Nagy, 2016; Kilpatrick, 1918). The programme was composed of short-term, small-scale projects, such as ‘The mushroom’, ‘Santa Claus’, ‘Christmas’ and ‘Carnival’. Each activity has its own description. The projects were interdisciplinary, involving mathematics, science, language, music and arts education as well as physical education. The theoretical background for these small-scale projects was based on the theory underlying meaningful learning and concept mapping (Ausubel, 1968; Habók, 2012; Novak, 1998; Novak & Gowin, 1984). Meaningful learning was fostered through communication conducted by the kindergarten teacher. The questions were directed to children to diagnose changes, find relations and draw conclusions. The activities were documented and a complex concept map was constructed by the end of the small-scale projects. The concept maps presented children’s activities and provided summaries of their findings.

Previous research has reported that the use of concept maps fosters pre-school children’s learning, but statistical evidence is not always presented. Therefore, the Hungarian school readiness tests were scanned and two parts of the ‘Diagnostic System for Assessing Development’ were found suitable for the research (Nagy et al., 2004). The ‘Experiential Reasoning’ (Vidákovich, 2004) and ‘Comprehension of Relations’ (Nagy et al., 2004) tests were administered in face-to-face data collection to measure children’s development before and after the concept mapping-based intervention programme. Both tests contain everyday life situations and are given with children’s prior knowledge. The complex programme lasted approximately seven months. The first research was implemented in 2011, where one kindergarten group formed the experimental group and another the control group. The second research was conducted in 2014 with the participation of one experimental group and three control groups.

The results show that the children who participated in the intervention programme significantly increased their achievement in both tests in the first phase of the research. When the research was repeated three years later, it was found that the children performed significantly higher at the end of the programme. The developmental effect of the programme was also confirmed by the control group, who indicated spontaneous development, but at a rate that was not as high as that of the experimental group.

Keywords:

Meaningful learning, concept mapping-based intervention programmes, pre-school.