Date Approved

5-1-1998

Embargo Period

8-9-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A. in School Psychology

Department

Educational Services and Leadership

College

College of Education

Advisor

Klanderman, John

Subject(s)

Moral education; Parent and child; Preschool children

Disciplines

Educational Psychology

Abstract

Earlier studies have shown that parental modeling and communication of values are significant factors in promoting prosocial behavior in young children. The current study was conducted to determine whether a relationship existed between preschoolers' prosocial behaviors and the importance their parents attributed to such behaviors. The prosocial behaviors of twenty preschoolers from a private preschool were compared to the behaviors of twenty preschoolers from a public, district-funded preschool. The preschool teachers from both schools rated the prosocial behaviors of the children based on how often they observed each child engaging in various behaviors. The parents rated how valuable they believed these behaviors were to their child's social development. When the teacher ratings were correlated with the parental ratings for both schools, no significant difference was found between the parent and teacher ratings for the two preschool groups. However, as a group, the private school preschoolers displayed more overall prosocial behaviors than did the children from the district funded preschool.

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