SOURCE:

Faculty: Education
Department: Ecpe

CONTRIBUTORS:

Ezeagu, A.A;
Obidike, N.D;
Onwuka, N.L;

ABSTRACT:

This study investigated teacher’s perception of socio-emotional competencies among primary school pupils through the role of early childhood education. Four research questions guided the study and four null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Related literatures were reviewed which exposed the need for the study. Descriptive survey research was adopted for the study. The population of the study consisted of 10,115 public primary school teachers in the 21 Local Government Education Authorities of Anambra State. A sample size of 630 public primary school teachers was drawn from the population using the multi-stage sampling technique. Data were collected using questionnaire developed by the researcher. The instrument was titled “Questionnaire on Enhancing Acquisition of Social-emotional Competencies among Primary School through Early Childhood Education" (QEASCPSECE). The study was subjected to face validation. The reliability of the instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha which yielded co-efficients of 0.79, 0.77, 0.76, 0.83 for the four clusters. The overall reliability value of the instrument yielded 0.78. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while t-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings of this study revealed that primary school teachers agreed that early childhood education enhances the acquisition of socio-emotional competencies (social awareness, relationship skills, self management, and responsible decision-making skills) of primary school pupils. Also, gender of primary school teachers was a significant factor on how ECE enhances the acquisition of self management and responsible decision-making competencies while gender of primary school teachers was not significant on how ECE enhances the acquisition social awareness and relationship skills competencies. Based on this findings, the researcher concluded that teachers perceived that ECE programme plays very important role in primary school pupil’s socio-emotional competences in Anambra State by promoting the social awareness, relationship skill, self management and responsible decision-making competencies in children. It was therefore recommended among others that the state government and primary school administrators should organize sensitization and seminar programmes for primary school teachers on the need to promote responsible decision-making competencies among pupils.