As emphasis is placed on the importance of childhood, which is the critical period to see language, cognitive, social, and emotional development as the foundation for lifelong growth and development, the importance of preschool teachers' roles and qua...
As emphasis is placed on the importance of childhood, which is the critical period to see language, cognitive, social, and emotional development as the foundation for lifelong growth and development, the importance of preschool teachers' roles and qualifications has begun to be emphasized as the most fundamental way to improve the quality of early childhood education. Since such a demand to cultivate qualifications is also applicable to beginning teachers in consideration of the characteristics of the teacher community, this study aims to have beginning teachers perform self-evaluation of their qualifications in order to give them opportunities to recognize required qualifications and establish a foothold for improving expertise and to provide information to improve efficiency of mentoring, teacher training programs, and internal autonomous supervision, all of which are to improve their expertise.
To answer the questions, a survey was conducted in 182 teachers with less than 2 years of career at kindergartens in 6 cities around the country. The collected data were analyzed by using an SPSSWIN 21.0 program, and the questionnaire in this study was composed of 8 items about character and 4 about health in terms of personal qualifications and 10 about knowledge, 15 about teaching techniques, and 5 about the view of teaching in terms of professional qualifications.
This study obtained the following results: first, beginning preschool teachers' personal qualifications by the personal variables were highly evaluated at higher than 3.0 in general; there was no significant difference in character by education, the institution type, or the class size, while it differed significantly by children's age in their class: mixed-age and five-year-old classes got higher evaluation than three- and four-year-old ones. There was no significant difference in health by education or the class size, while it differed significantly by the institution type―national/public kindergartens got higher evaluation than private ones―and by children's age in their class―mixed-age classes got the highest evaluation, followed by three-, five-, and four-year-old ones.
Second, beginning preschool teachers' professional qualifications by the personal variables got slightly higher evaluation than average on the basis of 3.0. Specifically, there was no significant difference in knowledge by education, the institution type, or the class size, while it showed statistically significant differences by children's age in their class: mixed-age and three-year-old classes got the highest evaluation, followed by four- and five-year-old ones. As for professional qualifications, there was no significant difference in the results from self-evaluation of teaching techniques by education, the institution type, or the class size, while it differed by children's age in their class: four-year-old classes got a lower level of self-evaluation than mixed-age or three-year-old ones, with the former getting the lowest level of self-evaluation. Lastly, as for the differences in the view of teaching by education, university graduates made slightly higher evaluation than college graduates, showing no statistically significant difference. It also differed insignificantly by the institution type or the class size, while it showed statistically significant differences by children's age in their class: mixed-age classes got the highest self-evaluation, followed by three-, four-, and five-year-old ones.