Commentary from the CRNA President, Dr. Yoichi Sakakihara

Non-cognitive skills has been recognized as important as cognitive skills in child development. Fostering non-cognitive skills has been regarded as one of the most imminent agenda in early child education and care. Compassion or empathy are among the core constituents of non-cognitive skills. Compassionate behaviors are expressed as prosocial behavior in everyday life.

In "Teacher's attempt and role in improving prosocial behavior of early childhood," the authors attempted to elucidate teacher's methods to foster children's prosocial behaviors.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among 19 kindergarten teachers asking for their commonly employed measures to foster children's prosocial behaviors. It was found that the most commonly used method was storytelling. Although the types of employed stories were not shown, it is easily speculated that teachers chose anecdotal stories on the beneficent outcomes of prosocial behaviors. Interestingly, teachers also adopt games as the measures to foster children's prosocial behaviors. Since adverse effects of games on child development have been widely emphasized in the public, more attention should be paid to their potential usefulness in improving children's prosocial behaviors.

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https://www.childresearch.net/projects/pdf/projects_fullpaper_2020_05.pdf

This paper was originally delivered as a paper presentation at the Third International Conference of Child Research Network Asia (CRNA), held in September, 2019 in Jakarta, Indonesia.