This study was conducted to investigate the relationship and effect of teacher variables related to early childhood play by analyzing the structural relationships among play teaching efficacy, play support competency, and teacher-child interaction of ...
This study was conducted to investigate the relationship and effect of teacher variables related to early childhood play by analyzing the structural relationships among play teaching efficacy, play support competency, and teacher-child interaction of early childhood teachers. To this end, questionnaires were distributed to 120 in-service teachers to measure each variable, and the collected data were analyzed for structural relationships between variables through descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation analysis, path analysis, and mediating effect verification. The results of the study are as follows. First, play teaching efficacy, play support competency, and teacher-child interaction of early childhood teachers had a significant positive correlation with each other. Second, play support competency acted as a complete mediating variable in the relationship between play teaching efficacy and teacher-child interaction, and its significance was verified. Based on these results, this study is meaningful in that it provides basic data necessary to find ways to strengthen expertise for early childhood play support by identifying the relationship between play-related variables of early childhood teachers, and suggests the importance of play support competency as a mediating variable.