The Effect of Kindergarteners’ Perceptions of School on their Attitudes towards School
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is a) to investigate kindergarteners’ perception of "school" through the impressions and images and b) to find out the effect of these perceptions on their attitudes towards school in cooperation with kindergarten teachers. This qualitative study is based on metaphor technique; the data of which is derived from kindergarteners’ perceptions of "school", researcher’s own observation of kindergarteners, and focus group interview with these kindergarteners’ teachers. The research group for metaphors consists of thirty-five kindergarteners from two different classes in a state kindergarten in Bursa. Thirty-three relevant, twenty-one different metaphors are collected from the data. These metaphors are grouped under six different conceptual categories according to their common features. In addition, several interviews are carried out with the kindergarteners’ teachers to determine the effect of these perceptions on kindergarteners’ attitude towards school. According to the analysis of the data collected from metaphor study, kindergarteners mostly perceive "school" as a ‘homelike’ place to live in comfortably and happily beside learning new things and playing games. Only five kindergarteners regard “school” negatively, and are detected to have attitudinal and disorientation problem. Determining the ways to cope with the negative attitudes of these five kindergarteners to school can be the focus of a further study.References
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