The investigation of teachers' awareness on preschool children's emotional and behavioral problems through personality traits and efficacy

The aim of this study is to investigate early childhood teachers' awareness level on understanding children's emotional and behavioral problems through teachers' personality traits and teachers' efficacy. Mixed research method and concurrent transformative design were used in this research. 85 preschool teachers were included voluntarily in the study by using convenient sampling method. The Big Five Inventory was implemented to determine early childhood teachers' personal traits, and Ohio State teacher efficacy scale (OSTES) was used to determine teachers' efficacy beliefs. An assessment form was developed by the researcher for getting information on teachers' awareness to children's emotional and behavioral problems. According to results of this study, preschool teachers' awareness to the problems was low. Although teachers can feel that the children have a problem, they have difficulties to identify what the problem is. Moreover, teachers have low awareness about making appropriate referral decisions. They do not know enough about services they will refer to children with emotional and behavioral problems. The results also showed that teachers' awareness is affected negatively when they start to assess children's emotional and behavioral conditions by making some assumptions based on their own experience in their life. The study suggested that these assumptions cause teacher to take children's behavior personally and to ignore children's developmental characteristics. Besides, there is no significant evidence that teachers' efficacy was found to be significant predictors of teachers' personality traits towards teachers' awareness on children's emotional and behavioral problems.