How successful are future teachers in interpreting facial expressions?

Facial expressions have a prominent role in communication and social interaction since they are connected with emotional experience. Starting from the importance of communication based on the respect for the child's emotions in education, the aim of our research was to examine the possibilities for enhancing the successfulness of future kindergarten and elementary school teachers by instructing them to understand facial expressions of children. The sample comprised 330 first year students of the Pedagogic Faculty at the University of Kragujevac. The successfulness in elucidation of facial expressions was measured by Paul Ekman's Test for facial expression understanding. The research design included initial testing, education in the field of emotional life (6 hours of theory and 6 hours of exercises) and final examination. The results show that the future preschool and elementary school teachers were equally unsuccessful in understanding facial expressions at the initial testing, but showed a significant progress at final testing (Z=-6.745; p<0.01), Bearing in mind that adequate interpretation of facial expressions is an important component of communicative competences, that communicative competencies are a necessary factor of professional teacher competencies and an important criterion of suitability for pedagogic profession, the results show that it is necessary to educate students to enhance their ability to understand facial expressions and learn more about emotional life in general.

Abstract licence: CC BY-SA

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