February 2, 1986

Construction has begun on the first new hotel to be built at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 15 years. It will be a Holiday Inn, and when it is completed the number of hotels clustered in and around the airport on Jamaica Bay in the southeastern corner of Queens will rise to seven, according to officials of the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau.

American children, although pained by the space shuttle explosion that killed a teacher who reminded them of one of their own, seem resiliently enthusiastic about the space program, according to a New York Times/ CBS News Poll. Two-thirds of the children who were asked said they would like to travel in space, as against only half their parents. More children than adults want to go on sending civilians into space, the poll indicates, and even those children who say the accident has made them think worse of the shuttle program overwhelmingly favor continuing it. Adults Also Enthusiastic Adult enthusiasm was also clear. Among the 1,120 adults interviewed, 80 percent said the shuttle program should continue, although only 46 percent said they would be willing to pay more in taxes if that proved necessary to keep it going.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko describes his work as a kind of borscht, the Russian beet soup in which any ingredient goes - as long as it tastes right in the end. It is the principle, he says, on which he writes his poetry, his novels, and which he used for his autobiographical film, ''Kindergarten.'' Mr. Yevtushenko, who wrote, directed and appears in ''Kindergarten,'' will be on hand in New York when it opens a two-week run Feb. 12 at the Film Forum. ''Kindergarten,'' Mr. Yevtushenko's first - and so far only - film, is about his evacuation as a boy of 9 from wartime Moscow to Siberia. En route he encounters noble thieves, evil speculators, death, love and a host of formative adventures. ''Kindergarten,'' which first opened in the Soviet Union in 1983, has had mixed reviews, for the same reason Mr. Yevtushenko often gets mixed reviews: it is a borscht made from a broad variety of ingredients, ranging from a starkly realistic Siberian to a surrealistic parade through Red Square by thousands of youths carrying goldfish in bowls.

THE conditions under which a flip tax may be imposed on the seller of a New York City co-op have been controversial issues for quite some time, with lower-court decisions offering no clear-cut guidelines. A flip tax is a transfer fee imposed by a co-op corporation on a tenant-shareholder at the time he sells his apartment. It can cost the seller $50,000 or more and normally is used by a corporation to build up its reserves. Now, however, a sense of direction seems to have been established - and new issues raised - by a Dec. 19 decision of the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, that struck down the flip taxes imposed in two buildings. The decision, written by Judge Bernard S. Meyer, is expected to make it tougher for co-op corporations to impose such taxes in the future - unless that right was written into their bylaws and all proprietary leases at the time the co-op was established or was agreed to later by a vote of the shareholders. The percentage of shareholder votes needed to make the tax legally valid is still in dispute, however.

Of Jobs and G.N.P. The employment figures for January will show another big rise, predicts David A. Levine, chief economist at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. And this, he says, points to a banner economic year. ''We expect the January rise in employment to confirm our view that 1986 will be a boom year,'' said Mr. Levine, who is predicting a real annual rise in gross national product of 7 percent for the year - twice the 1985 gain. According to Mr. Levine, this Friday's Government report will show that 300,000 jobs were created last month, on top of hefty increases posted in fourth-quarter 1985.