Comparative analysis of parents’ and preschool teachers’ assessments and practices in fostering preschoolers’ social competence
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Abstract
Background. Against the backdrop of rapid socio‑cultural change, the development of social competence in preschool children has become a key task of education. Despite broad recognition of its importance, empirical data indicate a low level of social competence in many children, which predicts later difficulties with adaptation and learning. This creates the need to analyse existing barriers and practices among the primary agents of socialisation—parents and educators.
Objective. To identify and compare parents’ and preschool teachers’ assessments, practices and perceived barriers in developing preschoolers’ social competence, in order to outline directions for optimising their collaborative efforts.
Sample. The study involved 178 parents of preschool children and 57 teachers from preschool educational institutions in Yuzhno‑Sakhalinsk.
Methods. The study was conducted as a cross‑sectional, multi‑informant survey. A specially designed questionnaire was used; to monitor data validity, it included fictitious, non‑existent methods.
Results. Parents and teachers showed a high degree of agreement in identifying the most difficult components of social competence: “anticipating the consequences of one’s actions”, “taking account of other people’s feelings” and “admitting rule‑breaking and correcting one’s behaviour”. This convergence reflects the objective difficulty of fostering metacognitive and reflective functions. At the same time, there were marked differences in the practical toolbox. Teachers actively employ structured techniques (role play with explicit rules – 72.6%, peer mediation and social stories – 47.4% each), whereas parents more often use emotion coaching (17.2% versus 5.3% among teachers), which can be explained by differences in interaction contexts. A key finding was the documented gap between declared knowledge and actual behaviour: 25.9% of parents and 18.1% of teachers reported using non‑existent methods, and 46.6% of parents and 26.3% of teachers chose ineffective strategies at least once in scenario‑based tasks. This points to insufficient operational competence and susceptibility to “pseudo‑scientific” rhetoric.
Conclusions. There is an objective consensus between parents and teachers regarding the core difficulties in developing preschoolers’ social competence. However, coordination of efforts between family and preschool institutions is hampered by differences in methodological resources and by the gap between declarative knowledge and everyday practice. To increase the effectiveness of work in this area, targeted measures are needed to provide methodological support for parents and to adapt evidence‑based practices (such as emotion coaching) to the realities of preschool groups.
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