PRESCHOOL TEACHER’S AWARENESS ATTITUDE AND CHALLENGES TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PLAY BASED LEARNING IN PRESCHOOLS OF GONDAR CITY ADMINISTRATION.

Abstract

The purpose of the research was to determine preschool teacher’s awareness, attitudes, and challenges in implementing play-based learning in the Gondar City administration. A concurrent embedded design was used to achieve this mixed method research design. Data were collected from 162 preschool teachers and 10 school principals. Preschool t teachers were selected through simple random sampling whereas principals were selected through purposive sampling. As a result, the researcher used a self-developed questionnaire for preschool teachers with a total of 44 closed-ended items as the major data collection instrument, while 5 semi-structured interview questions were used to triangulate the data gathered through the questionnaires. Descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation, multiple linear regression, and theme analysis were used to examine the data. According to the findings of this study preschool teachers have a reasonable level of awareness and a positive attitude toward the implementation of play based learning. This study also found that awareness was strongly associated with attitude and play-based learning, whereas attitude and play-based learning were strongly associated with play-based learning implementation. Furthermore, variations in participants' awareness, attitude, experience, educational level, and training style accounted for around 55.9% of the difference in play-based learning implementation. Preschool teacher’s perform diverse and complicated tasks in implementing play-based learning in the classroom, according to the current study, but they face a variety of problems in doing so, including competence, structural, attitudinal, conceptual, and resource challenges. In conclusion, the study found that the connected aspects of preschool teacher’s' awareness and attitude, as well as their demographic variables, can predict the application of play-based learning.