Nutritional awareness and its relationship to self-efficacy in kindergarten children

Abstract

    The aim of the current research is to identify the nutritional awareness and self-efficacy of kindergarten children, as well as to identify the significance of differences in nutritional awareness and self-efficacy according to the gender variable (males - females) respectively. The researchers built a nutritional awareness scale based on Bandura's theory (1997), which consists of (35) paragraphs that the kindergarten teacher answers with two alternatives (yes - no), and with scores (0 - 1). The two scales were applied to a sample of (150) boys and girls, and then the psychometric properties (validity - reliability) were extracted.  Where the validity was extracted by the methods of apparent validity and construct validity, while the reliability was by the method of split-half, and its value was (0.79), and the standard error value of the nutritional awareness scale from the reliability coefficient was (3.092), while the researchers built the self-efficacy scale based on Bandura's theory (1997), as (30) paragraphs were formulated for the teacher to answer with two alternatives (yes - no), and with degrees (0 - 1), and the psychometric properties were extracted from (validity and reliability); where the validity was by the methods of apparent validity and construct validity, while the reliability was by the method of split-half on the research sample, and its value was (0.83), and the standard error of the scale from the reliability coefficient was (2.312), and the results showed that the children have nutritional awareness and self-efficacy;  The calculated T-values ​​were higher than the tabular ones at the level of (0.05), and no differences were found between the sexes for both variables, while there was a high positive direct relationship between them, as the value of the correlation coefficient was (0.87), In light of the results, the researchers came up with a set of recommendations and proposals.