Research on the Assessment of Kindergarten Teachers' Professional Competence

In recent years, the "relational turn" has emerged as a key perspective in the humanities and social sciences, positioning relationality at the heart of educational inquiry. Grounded in theories of relational existence and symbolic interactionism, this study develops a theoretical framework for kindergarten teachers' professional competence and empirically validates it through a large-scale questionnaire survey, which led to the development of the Kindergarten Teacher Professional Competence Self-Assessment Scale. Findings reveal that kindergarten teachers' professional competence is a multidimensional construct comprising five interrelated factors: caring and supporting ability, knowledge mastery ability, reflection and self-change ability, leadership and organization ability, and social communication ability. The scale demonstrates strong reliability and validity, serving as a robust instrument for evaluating kindergarten teachers' professional competence and for sensitively capturing variations in competence across teachers with differing years of experience, educational attainment, and income levels.