Playfulness and Entry Assessment Performance of Incoming Kindergarten and Grade I Pupils

Abstract

In the advent of the COVID-19, children have missed a meaningful interaction with their classmates in school. It is supposedly customary to play with each other while the teachers offer this time solely for the enjoyment and recreational moment. But intentionally due to the unprecedented virus, the DepEd prohibits them in such events. In determining how various plays during the pandemic have experienced, the study was conducted and correlated playfulness and assessment performance of children before entering into formal schooling. The respondents were incoming kindergarten and grade I pupils. Descriptive-correlation design was employed since the sample mean (X)and standard deviation (s) were used for initial analysis, and inferential statistics is employed to test the null hypotheses. Samples were selected through a stratified random sampling and yielded incoming Kindergarten = 43, and grade I = 54. The playfulness was measured through the 5-point Likert scale. Incoming Kindergarten obtained a WM=3.07 with VD-"Sometimes," and WM=3.68, VD-"Very Often." While a validated and reliability tested, a questionnaire was used for the entry assessment. The Kindergarten obtained X = 82.23, “Satisfactory,” s=13.03, and grade I, X= 92.33 “Outstanding,” s=6.06. The socio-demographic profiles such as sex and income showed no significant relationship with playfulness and entry assessment performance for both grade levels. The calculated Pearson product- moment correlation coefficient showed no significant relationship between playfulness and entry assessment performance, Kindergarten, r(43)=.194, p=.425, and r(54), .151, p=.492 for grade I. There was no sufficient evidence to reject the null hypotheses of no significant relationships; instead, they retained them as the study's findings. The levels of the playfulness of these children have nothing to do with their entry assessment performance, and sex and income did not give sufficient evince to convey that they were related.