Internalizing problems in the behaviour of children of early and preschool age - self-assessment of educators’ competencies with regard to work experience

The goal of this research was to explore educators’ self-assessmentsof their competencies to work with children with internalizing problems,considering the length of their work experience, because modern approachesto competence research are holistic and focused on the combination of formaleducation and training. As many as 111 educators participated in the research,and the data were, among other things, processed with the χ2-test, multivariateanalysis of variance and discriminant analysis. The results of the researchshow that educators with the greatest amount of work experience self-assesstheir competencies and frequency of training better than do educators withless work experience. Differences were also found in the self-assessments ofspecific knowledge about internalizing problems in such a way that educatorswho had 31 or more years of work experience achieved the highest resultsin the area of knowledge about individual characteristics of children, whileeducators with up to 10 years of work experience predominantly recognizedphenomenological forms of internalizing problems. The value of this researchis that the results identify difficulties related to the competence of educators andcan be guidelines for further training.