The Effects of Situational Role Playing-Centered Safety Education through Fairy Tales on Children's Safety Knowledge and Safety Problem Solving Ability

This study investigated the effect of situational role playing-centered safety education through fairy tales on children's safety knowledge and safety problem-solving ability. The study selected 50 five-year-old children in Y Kindergarten in I Metropolitan City as the study subjects; the children were divided into experimental and control groups of 25 children each. Both groups carried out each assigned program with the same safety topics based on the seven standards for school safety, but the experiment group conducted the safety education program based on situational role playing through fairy tales planned by the researcher, and the control group conducted the annual safety education programs that were planned in kindergarten. Both pre-and post-tests were conducted across two weeks, and the experimental treatment was conducted twice a week for 12 weeks, resulting in a total of 24 sessions. The mean and standard deviation were calculated from the collected data, and covariance analysis was performed to determine the difference between the groups. The results of this study showed that first, the experimental group improved significantly compared to the control group in terms of safety knowledge and its sub-factors, such as life safety, traffic safety, violence prevention and personal protection, prevention of drug and cyber addiction, disaster safety, occupational safety, and first aid. Second, the experimental group showed a significant improvement over the control group in terms of the ability to solve safety problems and their sub-factors including playing, complying with traffic safety rules, and emergency response. This suggests that it is necessary to make active efforts to provide concrete and practical child safety education activities in order to derive sustainable effectiveness in each area of the seven standards for school safety education in the field of early childhood education by utilizing situational role playing-centered safety education programs through fairy tales.