The effectiveness of educational games based on social-emotional learning on increasing the social-emotional abilities in preschool children

Considering the importance of social-emotional abilities in childhood especially in preschool age, the necessity of intervention with the aim of improving and promoting of social-emotional abilities and using game-based educational methods, especially for preschool children, the present research was conducted with the aim of determining the effectiveness of educational games based on social-emotional learning on increasing social-emotional abilities in preschool children. The present study was a semi-experimental with pretest, posttest and two-month follow-up design with control group. The research population was a preschool children of 4th district of Mashhad city in the 2020-2021 academic years. The research sample was 48 people who were selected by available sampling method and randomly by lottery replaced into two groups of 24 people. The experimental group was trained 20 sessions of 45 minutes with the method of educational games based on social-emotional learning and the control group was placed on the waiting list for training. The research tool was the social-emotional assets and resiliency scale for preschool. The data were analyzed by methods of analysis of variance with repeated measures and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS software version 25 at a significant level of 0.05. The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of social-emotional abilities in preschool children. In the other words, educational games based on social-emotional learning increased social-emotional abilities in preschool children and the results remained in the follow-up phase (P<0.05). According to the results of this research, planning is necessary to improve social-emotional abilities in preschool children based on educational games based on social-emotional learning along with other effective educational methods.