Social and Emotional Competencies And Attitudes of Parents and Educators As Determinants of Abilities and Talents Perception of Preschool Children

Abstract

To ensure that the process of giftedness development runs smoothly, it is necessary to build adequate socio-emotional competencies related to the ability to use various social and emotional stimulation from the environment to achieve results that enable satisfactory and competent participation in groups, communities, and society to which individual belongs. The goal of this research was to examine whether and to what extent are socio-emotional competencies of parents and Kindergarten teachers are significant predictors of the perception of talents of preschool children. The sample consisted out of 100 participants from Zeničko-Dobojski kanton, 75 parents, and 25 educators. As instruments, we used: Questionnaire of general sociodemographic data (SD questionnaire), Giftedness Questionnaire (Von Krafft and Semke, 2008), and questionnaire of socioemotional competencies of educators (Jusufovic, unpublished paper). The results indicate that among all socio-emotional competencies of parents the only that is significant predictor is awareness of others for assessing the expression of one’s characteristics, for assessing the expression of talent and out of socio-demographic variables, the variable of age parents is significant, but only for assessing the expression of talents (older parents perceive less giftedness). Furthermore, in the case of educators, pure non-violent communication is important for socio-emotional competencies for the expression of one’s characteristics, then for the expression of talents significant factors are non-violent communication, awareness of others, emotion regulation, self-esteem, and the total score of socio-emotional competencies. Among socio-demographic characteristics, the important predictor is working experience for perceiving talents. In addition to this, there are statistically significant differences between parents and educators, in an expression of talent, and the results show that educators are better in the estimation of expression of talents.