The relationship between the educational beliefs of preschool teachers and their character and temperament traits

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the educational beliefs held by preschool teachers and their character and temperament traits. This study, which employed a descriptive correlational design, was carried out with the participation of 292 preschool teachers employed at public and private schools in the 2022-2023 academic year. The character trait of self-directedness and the temperament trait of novelty-seeking in the Temperament and Character Inventory, which was adapted to Turkish by Köse et al. in 2004, were used to determine the character and temperament traits of the participants. While the Demographic Information From developed by the researcher was used to collect the descriptive information of the participants, the Educational Beliefs Scale, which was developed by Yılmaz, Altınkurt, and Çokluk in 2011, was utilized to identify their educational beliefs. The collected data were found to be normally distributed, and the independent-samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) methods were employed to analyze the data. According to the results of the study, the participants adopted progressive educational beliefs more than other forms of educational beliefs. It was determined that the female participants adopted progressive educational beliefs more prevalently, while the male participants adopted essentialist educational beliefs more prevalently. Additionally, the participants who were working at public schools had a higher rate of holding educational beliefs centered around perennialism. The educational beliefs of the participants did not differ significantly based on their age, professional seniority, or employment status. The novelty-seeking category of temperament traits was observed more frequently among the male participants, while the self-directedness category of character traits was observed more frequently among the female participants. The character traits of the participants did not vary significantly based on their seniority levels, whereas their novelty-seeking traits, as a component of temperament traits, showed a significant variation based on their seniority. The ages of the participants were positively correlated with their self-directedness levels and negatively correlated with their novelty-seeking levels. No significant relationship was found between the adoption of progressive educational beliefs and character or temperament traits. Furthermore, there was a weak negative relationship between reconstructionist educational beliefs and self-directedness as a character trait, but there was no significant relationship between reconstructionist educational beliefs and novelty-seeking as a temperament trait. Moreover, there was a weak negative relationship between essentialist educational beliefs and novelty-seeking, while there was a moderate negative relationship between essentialist educational beliefs and self-directedness. The perennialism-oriented educational beliefs of the participants were weakly and negatively correlated with their novelty-seeking and self-directedness traits.