Study On Promoting Children’s Helping Behavior Based On Theory Of Mind By Storybooks Reading

The Guidelines for Kindergarten Education（for Trial Implementation）states that the educational goals for the social domain include: being willing to interact with others,learning to help each other,cooperate and share,and having compassion.The Guidelines for the Learning and Development of Children Aged 3-6 years also set specific developmental goals for 5-6 year olds to be able to pay attention to the emotions and needs of others and to give what help they can.However,some studies have shown that young children’s helping behavior are predominantly passive,external motivations for helping are important,and there is a disconnect between helping perceptions and helping behaviors.The root cause of these problems is that young children have a low understanding of others’ emotions,mental states,and behaviors,and do not know or are unsure when others need their help.Therefore,in the process of kindergarten education and teaching,teachers guide children to understand the mental states of others and enhance their helping behavior based on theory of mind,which is an inherent requirement for achieving the educational goals of the social domain and an important process for promoting socialization.The cultivation of young children’s theory of mind and helping behavior has become an increasing concern in preschool education in various countries,and practicing this goal with storybooks is a common practice in preschool education practices.However,from the available research literature at home and abroad,we found that: first,scholars have different views on whether young children can understand the difference between real and imagined characters and events in storybooks;second,there is not enough comprehensive research on young children’s theory of mind and helping behaviors in storybooks reading instruction;and third,research on whether the growth of the theory of mind brought about by storybooks reading instructional interventions translates into helping behaviors has yet to be verified.Using these findings as a direction for research,this study uses fictional fairy tale storybooks with strong fantasy and realistic storybooks on the theme of various stories produced by children in their homes,schools,and other environments to further explore young children’s ability to discern truth from fiction.The study will determine whether the intervention can promote children’s rational helping behaviors based on their theory of mind by intervening in children’s theory of mind through fairy tale storybooks and realistic storybooks reading and teaching activities,test whether the increase in theory of mind brought about by the intervention translates into rational helping behaviors in an experimental context,and refine the observation form for children’s helping behaviors in kindergarten day activities in the course of the study.In this study,a total of 24 children in a middle school class in a private school in Changchun were selected for the action research.First,in order to effectively control the irrelevant variable,natural maturity of children,and to test the effect of the theory of mind-based storybooks reading on rational helping behavior,children were divided into two groups of equal level;second,following the principle of "planning-action-reflection",the experimental group was asked questions focusing on fairy tale storybooks and realistic story books,and the experimental group focused on theory of mind of the characters,while the control group focused on the behaviors of the characters,and practiced storybooks reading activities to cultivate children’s theory of mind-based helping behaviors.Finally,the children’s helping behaviors were tested in the experimental situation to determine whether the increase in theory of mind brought about by the intervention translated into rational helping behaviors.The following conclusions were drawn from this study: first,storybooks reading focusing on theory of mind was more effective than storybooks reading focusing on character behavior in enhancing young children’s theory of mind and helping behavior in day-to-day life and experimental conflict situations;second,theory of mind resources in fairy tale storybooks and realistic storybooks have different values in helping young children’s theory of mind and helping behavior;third,the observation form for helping behavior of young children was refined and became an objective indicator to assess the level of helping behavior of young children.These findings validate the hypotheses of this study and continue Deborah’s（2020）research.These findings provide important insights from theoretical and practical perspectives on picture book reading to enhance young children’s rational helping behaviors.