Factors Influencing the Development of Soft Skills in Early Childhood Educators at Local Child Development Centers Under Local Administrative Organizations in Thailand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognizing children and adolescents as critical assets for the current and future development of the country, in this research we focus on the sensitive early years that are accompanied by a rapid pace of brain growth and ease of learning. Because most parents need to work, and therefore a considerable number of younger children require supervision, researchers believe that the competency of educators directly influences the development of soft skills in children. Studies have shown that gaps in softer skills precisely cause the lack of effectiveness of early childhood educators in fostering appropriate development of children in these centers. As a result, in this mixed-methods study we explore the phenomenon of soft skill acquisition among early childhood educators in three stages: first qualitative, then quantitative exploratory, followed by confirmatory factor analyses. Participants include 12 childcare workers and 420 qualified educators. We perform the quantitative data collection through a combination of interviews and scripted questionnaires, after which we conduct data analysis using Jamovi. Ethical protocols of the study include issuing and upholding guarantees for consent and anonymity. The sample is a single-gender group with a mean age of 38.80 years (standard deviation = 11.9). Over half, 56%, have attained a bachelor’s degree, whereas 34.6% hold an associate’s degree. In the analysis we identify three core components of soft skills: 1) creative thinking skillset (factors include providing appropriate answers and innovation), 2) communication skillset (which contains active listening and empathy), and 3) patience skillset (which contains resilience and motivation). The emphasis on these underspecified soft skills is due to a lack of systematic training incorporated into professional development, which is essential, given the interpersonal nature of the work, in early childhood education. In this study we aim to address the gap by integrating the three components—creative thinking skills, communication skills, and patience skills—into training and evaluation frameworks based on the fundamentals of educator effectiveness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".