Research on pre-school teachers' self-efficacy in nutrition education

The purpose of this study is to determine the self-efficacy of preschool teachers' regarding nutrition education. The research was carried out in the descriptive type scanning model which is one of the quantitative research methods. The working group, through the full census which expresses the entire population consists of 380 pre-school teachers who work in public and private kindergardens or elementary schools that are officially affiliated to the Directorate of National Education within the Center of Bitlis Province and Tatvan, Ahlat, Adilcevaz, Güroymak, Mutki, Hizan districts in the Academic Year of 2019-2020. In the research, as a data collection tool in the collection of quantitative data in order to determine the self-efficacy of preschool teachers' regarding nutrition education; "Preschool Teacher Nutrition Education Self-Efficacy Scale" which was developed by Angın (t.y) and "Personal Information Form" prepared by the researcher were used. In the statistical analyzes obtained, SPSS 21.0 program, t test for parametric test unrelated samples to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the averages of two different groups, there is a statistically significant difference between at least two of the averages of more than two independent groups. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for parametric test unrelated samples. It was observed that the average of nutrition education self-efficacy points of preschool teachers who participated in the study was 122.48. It was determined that 62.1% of teachers had medium, 19.7% had high, and 18.2% had low self-efficacy. It was found that the nutritional education selfefficacy scores of preschool teachers who took part in the study showed a significant difference in favor of male teachers (p<0.05), those who got nutrition education (p<0.05) and the ones who had an adequate and balanced diet (p<0.05). In addition to this, there was a significant difference between the permanent teachers and contracted teachers in favor of permanent teachers (p<0.05). However, it was observed that there was no significant relationship between pre-school teachers' nutritional education self-efficacy and other variables (age, seniority, educational background, age group studied, class size, type of school) (p>0.05).