The effectiveness of educational games based on social-emotional learning on self-regulation, responsibility and emotional knowledge in preschool children

Background and Aim: Social-emotional growth and development in the preschool period plays an important role in academic and non-academic skills in the preschool period and other periods. This research was conducted with the aim of determining the effectiveness of educational games based on social-emotional learning on self-regulation, responsibility and emotional knowledge in preschool children. Methods: This was a semi-experimental study with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The research population was preschool children of the 4th district of Mashhad in the academic year of 2019-2019. The sample of the research was 48 people who were selected by the available sampling method and replaced randomly in two equal groups. Then the experimental group was trained for 20 sessions of 45 minutes with the method of educational games based on social-emotional learning, and the control group did not receive training during this period. Data were collected with three subscales of self-regulation, responsibility and emotional knowledge from the scale of social-emotional values and resilience for preschool children and were analyzed with chi-square, independent t-tests and multivariate covariance analysis in SPSS-25 software. Results: The findings showed that in the pre-test stage, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of any of the variables of self-regulation, responsibility, and emotional knowledge (P>0.05), but in the post-test stage, there was a significant difference in terms of all three mentioned variables (P<0.05). ). Other findings showed that the intervention of educational games based on social-emotional learning caused a significant increase in self-regulation, responsibility and emotional knowledge in preschool children (P<0.001). Conclusion: The results showed the effectiveness of educational games based on social-emotional learning on increasing self-regulation, responsibility and emotional knowledge in preschool children. Therefore, to improve the social-emotional values of preschool children, the method of educational games based on social-emotional learning can be used along with other methods.