Preferred Name
Jason Cha
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Summer 2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
Advisor(s)
Elena Savina
Anne Stewart
Robin D. Anderson
Abstract
This small-scale pilot study explored the effectiveness of proposed research instruments in measuring the outcomes of the prosocial and global education curriculum, Journey Around the World (JAWD), regarding attitudes toward school, affective language, prosocial motivation and behavior of second-grade school students.
Overall, the results of this study support the research methodology. Specifically, the proposed measures demonstrated the capacity to detect the positive changes following the Journey Around the World program in the attitudes toward school, learning motivation, affective vocabulary, and prosocial behavior and motivation. Furthermore, the results demonstrated the sensitivity of the proposed method to reflect the children’s growing appreciation for diversity and cultural perspective taking. Nevertheless, some measures needed modifications. These include the following: 1) the Peer Nominations method should be reduced to include only one question per category; 2) the Sticker Sharing test should include three distinct emotions (e.g., sadness, anxiety, and fear) and photographs of different characters; 3) only one situation per category of prosocial behavior to assess children’s perceptions of others’ motivations for prosocial behaviors; and 4) all the proposed stories should include hypothetical characters of different ethnicity and/or culture to accurately assess children’s cultural sensitivity.
The results also indicate a need to refine the Journey Around the Curriculum implementation to place more emphasis on exploring the effect of the curriculum on children’s oral and written language, including teaching emotional vocabulary. All in all, the obtained results can be used for refining both the Journey Around the World curriculum and the outcome measures in order to conduct a large-scale program evaluation study in the future.
Recommended Citation
Cha, Jae Seung, "The effect of journey around the world curriculum on prosocial behavior in elementary school children: A pilot study" (2017). Dissertations, 2014-2019. 131.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss201019/131
