A study on the effect of raising children’s citizenship awareness through nature-friendly forest activities

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of nature-friendly forest play activities on infants’ democratic civic awareness. Based on nature-friendly forest play activities that went through the second stage of research and development by Kim Se-young et al. (2015), the program was carried out to supplement and revise activities to fos- ter democratic civic awareness among infants. Among the subjects, 51 children (24 in the experimental group and 27 in the control group) were conducted at a private kindergarten located in D-gu, Seoul. As an inspection tool, Ko Jeong-ri (2015) used a reconstructed infant civic awareness inspection tool, and the design of pre- and post- testing groups verified the effect of nature-friendly forest play activities on infant democratic awareness. As a result of the ANCOVA using the SPSS 22.0 program, nature-friendly forest play activities had significant effects in the sub- regions of infant democratic civic awareness as well as other respect, responsibility, and cooperative consciousness. However, there was no statistically significant effect in the spirit of compliance among the sub-regions of democrat- ic civic awareness. This study is meaningful as a basic data for democratic civic awareness and forest play activities, as democratic civic awareness in infancy developed elements necessary for community life as educational activities and linked them to nature-friendly forest play activities.