Learning Through Cooperation And The Project Method In Pre-School Education In Romania

Participants

46 teachers completed voluntarily the questionnaire. 56% of respondents have a teaching experience of more than 20 years, and the others less. 60% of the preschool teachers have the first didactic degree (which is the highest stage of the teaching career in Romania), and the others have the second didactic degree, the definitive didactic degree or are debutants. 56% of the preschool teachers teach in the urban area. The respondents’ level of expertise and the years of teaching experience ensure the response credibility. In research, was involved the teacher for preschool education Moldovan Krisztina Rita, who developed the questionnaire based on the study of several bibliographic sources and accepted using its results in this study.

Procedure

Data collection was conducted using the questionnaire survey method. The questionnaire applied by the preschool teacher had three parts. The first part had 3 demographic items referring to the years of teaching experience, the teaching degree and the environment where participants teach. The second part contained eight items (questions 1-8) regarding the use by the teachers of the group activities in their kindergarten activity, but also the way that pupils cooperated within the group. Out of these, 3 items were dual-choice Yes / No, 4 multiple choice, and one open item. The third part of the questionnaire contained a total of 6 questions (questions 9-14) and targeted learning through the project method. Out of these, 2 items were dual-choice Yes / No, 2 multiple choice, and two open items.

Analysis of teachers’ perceptions about the use of cooperative learning in kindergartens

All preschool teachers, regardless of their years of teaching experience or age, say they use the groups’ activity and on their kindergarten groups prevails an atmosphere of cooperation. Teachers were asked to reflect on the situation in their group of pre-schoolers and to determine the share of the types of activities (group, frontal and individual activities) they used during a school year. By doing the average of the answers, the group activity has a percentage of 40%, being higher than the other types of activities, the frontal one accumulating 35% and the individual one 25% of 100%. This result is also explained by the fact that in the current curriculum for pre-school education it is necessary to organize some groups’ activities. By observing the kindergarten activity, the groups are formed either spontaneously or according to certain criteria established by the educators. The fact that both individual and frontal activities have a relatively large proportion is explained by the fact that all three types of activities are important in the teaching process conducted in pre-school education.

Regarding the reasons of preferring group activities, the preschool teachers mentioned several that were, in fact, advantages of group activities. Analysing the answers to this question (Table 1 ), we deduce that group activity helps pupils learn more easily from one another. Also activities carried out in this manner are more effective than frontal or individual ones, because pupils are actively involved in their realization, develop their communication and cooperation skills, help increase children’s responsibility towards their own learning, but also towards the group. These results confirm the kindergarten observations that the relations between the members of the group are more numerous and more diversified than during the activity with the whole group when they usually have a passive role. Pupils are more active and spontaneous when they work in small groups, communicate and interact more with group colleagues, encourage each other to solve tasks or to carry out collective work, educate team spirit and help others, thus learning the human behaviour and satisfying personal needs of compassion and appreciation.

Referring to group work, preschool teachers were asked to specify how much the pupils were involved in solving group tasks. Almost all preschool teachers (45, representing 97.8%) consider that pre-school children are very much or pretty much involved in performing tasks at the group level. From the discussion with the questioned teachers, this is also due to the fact that in this type of activity the resources can be better used, the didactic material is no longer the same for all, it is more diversified and the time available for its handling and its exploitation by the pupils increases significantly.

By another question, teachers were asked to express their perceptions about the effects of cooperative learning on pre-school children with weaker performances. All teachers considered the activities carried out through cooperation between pupils, both in the freely chosen activities and in the compulsory activities, determined the improvement of the results of each child.

Referring to the fact whether the emotive pre-schoolers become more courageous in groups activity than in individual task, all preschool teachers find an improvement of pre-school children self-confidence in group activities, 67.4% of whom consider this to be often, and the remaining 32.6% sometimes.

To establish the biggest role of cooperation activities, several variants were offered. For each variant a score of 1 to 7 had to be chosen by respondents, 7 points being awarded for the answer with the greatest importance. After calculating the scores in Table 2 , it is noted that the most important role of cooperative learning, in the opinion of the questioned preschool teachers, is to facilitate learning from each other among pupils. The next places are for the development of communication skills and the increase in the performance of children participating in the activities organized in this manner.

Analysis of teachers’ perceptions about project learning in kindergartens

From the analysis of the results to the first question about the use of the project method in the kindergarten, we find that all preschool teachers claim to apply it to the activity with preschoolers. All teachers think that learning through projects is more effective than learning by traditional methods.

The preschool teachers were asked to state the degree of agreement or disagreement on the fact that the teacher-child interaction during the project favours knowledge systematization. 38 (82.6%) of the preschool teachers agree with this statement, while the remaining 5 (17.4%) of them express their total agreement. In didactic papers (Dulamă, 2013), in describing the steps followed by learners are predominant the activities in which they work individually or in groups, without being monitored by the teacher. In realizing the projects, in order to ensure good quality knowledge and research, pre-school children need more support, and the educator is a "careful guide, a person - a resource that supports the respect of the individual learning pathway, the child and their own rhythm"(Preda, 2002, p.7).

Two items asked teachers to highlight two advantages and two difficulties of learning using the project method. We centralised the advantages identified by teachers in Table 2 and difficulties in Table 3 .

The main advantage of the project method identified by half of the respondents is that learning activities are integrated. This is obvious because in an integrated holistic approach, the boundaries between information coming from various sciences disappear. Learning activities are consistently and harmoniously blended into a unitary scenario, in which pre-school pupils perceive and represent the reality as an ensemble. The project method is probably the most appropriate method for the integrated approach and for the direct knowledge of reality by pre-schoolers. Teachers identify several benefits of using this method in pre-school education (e.g. pupils can propose themes, teamwork, parents’, grandparents’ and experts’ involvement, stimulation of creativity). In addition, through the direct observations made in kindergartens, we found out that during the realization of a project, the educator combines a range of activities (at choice, communes, games and afternoon activities) and various organizing ways (individual, group, frontal), thus giving pupils more contexts in which they practice in a motivating and pleasant way, active learning and learning through experience. Thus, the project method brings more lightness and more coherence to the teaching process, by correlating learning activities with the child’s social and cultural life.

The greatest difficulty of carrying out a thematic project mentioned by over 60% of preschool teachers is that it requires many teaching materials. Since the kindergarten does not have a special fund for thematic projects, the parents’ help is used to provide materials, but most of the time they get too late in the kindergarten. In addition to the lack of materials, the large number of children in a group and the control of the areas of incentive are other difficulties in the implementation of the projects in the pre-school education in Romania, mentioned by some 40% of the educators. Being many children in some groups (sometimes over 30 children), even if the teacher divides them into two or more groups, it is difficult to maintain the order required to carry out educational activities, to monitor the activity, to pay attention and support each child. If teachers supervise and support pre-schoolers in a group, the other group, not being supervised, may have difficulty in solving tasks. Also, a combined group, where children have different ages, a different level of development, and the existence of individual differences, is another problem that makes it more difficult to carry out thematic projects, with 28.3% of the educators mentioning this issue.

Although preschool teachers have pointed out that there are a lot of difficulties in developing kindergarten learning through projects, when they were asked to choose in the future between traditional learning and project-based learning, all 46 educators have preferred the project learning. This reflects the fact that teachers are aware of the benefits of children’s involvement in various projects, motivating them to find solutions and overcome the material difficulties, the lack of time and human resources to provide them with an optimal learning environment (Table 04 ).