The Experimental Study On The Delay Of Gratification And Strategy Of The 3-5 Year-old Children In The Different Situations

Self-control is one of the important child's qualities, which chiefly conducts both the resistance to the temptation and the delay of gratification. In the recent 30 years, the delay of gratification would be the main paradigm for the study of the self-control that is the core of the child social development. Therefore, the study on the characteristics of the child delay of both gratification and strategy will definitely provide theoretical evidence for the child definite, social development. And the study on the theory in other countries is developed further than that of China, but the delaying gratification contrast studies on the individual and the group are still less while largely hanging around the starting period in our country. The papers that are focused on the individual and the group contrast study on the delay strategy of the 3-5 year-old children are not found. It has been known that human beings must have been influenced by their surroundings in the course of developing from a nature person to a social one. The study, on the delay of gratification and strategy of the 3-5 year-old children in the individual and group situation, means a theoretical value and true significance for the developing psychology, the educational psychology, the psychological education and training programs etc. The experiment, combined with the EID1 experimental pattern, adopts the methods of the philology, of the experimentation, the behavior observation and the conversation. A random, layered sample of ninety 3-5 year-old children from the kindergarten of the Inner Mongolia Normal University is taken as the examinee. The expressions of child behaviors both in the individual and the group situation are carefully monitored, with the monitoring videotapes analyzed and coded afterwards. The delaying gratifying and strategic characteristics that reflect the differences in the age, the situation and the sex are explored. With the definition of an independent variable A: the age of children (range from 3 to 5), that of a variable B: the situation (range from individual to group), and that of a variable C: the sex (male or female), 3×2×2 mixed experimental design harbors 12 experimental processing combinations in which the situations are defined as within-test factors. The delaying time as well as the time that is applied in the various delaying tactics is defined as a dependent variable. The experimental study reaches a set of main conclusions that there is a significant age difference in the delaying-gratifying ability, increasing constantly according to the age; that under the same experimental conditions, in the individual and the group situations, there exist insignificant differences in both the delaying time and its tactics apart from a significant difference in"the help-seeking tactics"; that there is an insignificant sex difference in the application of the delaying gratification and its tactics; that in the transfer of attention type, there is a significant age difference in the playing attention transfer tactics and the long-term attention transfer, increasing with the age, that there is a significant difference in the situation of both the short-term attention transfer and the watching attention transfer tactics; that both the short-term and the watching attention transfer tactics predominate in the individual situation, as well as both the long-term and the playing attention transfer; and that the transfer of attention tactics in the delaying situation is mostly applied in the 3-5 age group while the preference for the application of the passive tactics is expressed in 5 year-old age group.