Teachers’ Perspective on the Needs of a Social-Emotional Learning Module for Preschoolers

Malaysia wants to improve children's social-emotional abilities, including their capacity to experience, control, and express their emotions as well as build close and safe interpersonal relationships with people around them. Social-emotional skills mastery will influence children’s learning style and readiness for formal education. Therefore, it is important to implement learning activities that can promote and nurture children’s social-emotional skills in the classroom. This study is conducted to identify the perspective of preschool teachers on social-emotional learning activities. A survey research design with a quantitative approach was conducted. An adapted questionnaire was distributed to 30 preschool teachers around the Klang Valley. The tool measured three constructs: the level of teacher comprehension, the level of social and emotional learning implementation, and the level to which preschoolers need social-emotional learning modules. To determine the mean values and standard deviations for the scores obtained for each construct, the data were examined descriptively. According to the study's findings, there is a high level of knowledge among teachers, a relatively high level of implementation, and a high level of demand for learning modules. Results indicate preschool teachers implemented social-emotional learning activities moderately in the classroom and they need support materials to do it better. Therefore, this study is significant to provide preliminary information on the need to develop learning modules for fostering children's social-emotional skills. In order to gather more precise data for the requirements analysis, this study can be improved in the future by including more respondents.