DEVELOPING THE MEDIA COMPETENCE OF PRESCHOOL EDUCATORS IN THE IN-SERVICE TRAINING SYSTEM: RESULTS OF A PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENT
Keywords:
Media competence, media education, preschool educator, in-service training, professional development, pedagogical experiment, media literacy.Abstract
The accelerating penetration of digital media into early childhood education has made the media competence of preschool educators a decisive factor of professional effectiveness. Existing in-service training programmes, however, address media-related skills fragmentarily and rarely rest on a validated diagnostic framework. This article reports a three-stage pedagogical experiment (2023–2025) designed to test an organisational-didactic model for developing the media competence of preschool educators within the in-service training system. The sample comprised 632 educators from Tashkent city, Tashkent region and Namangan region, divided into an experimental group (EG, n = 316) and a control group (CG, n = 316). Media competence was operationalised through three components — motivational-axiological, content-related and procedural — each measured on a three-level scale. The experimental intervention consisted of a 72-hour special course combined with project-based, discussion-based and game-based media education technologies. At the ascertaining stage the groups were statistically homogeneous (t = 0.424; p > 0.05). At the control stage the difference between them became highly significant for every component (t > 8.4; χ² > 76.0; p < 0.001). In the EG the share of educators at the high level rose from 10.1 % to 34.5 %, while the mean score increased from 2.75 to 3.63 points; in the CG the corresponding changes were 9.5 % to 12.7 % and 2.73 to 2.89. The effect size (Cohen's d = 0.697) indicates a practically meaningful impact. The findings support the proposed model and suggest that media competence develops most reliably when theoretical modules are integrated with sustained media production practice.
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