Supporting social-emotional competence in pre-service teachers: evidence from higher learning teacher education institutions in Tanzania.

Social-emotional competence (SEC) is important for teachers' professional practice and wellbeing, yet evidence regarding its development in Tanzanian pre-service teacher education remains limited. Guided by Social Cognitive Theory, this study examined the associations of perceived university curriculum quality, faculty support, and peer support with pre-service teachers' SEC and whether beliefs in social-emotional learning (SEL) accounted statistically for part of these associations. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted among second- and third-year pre-service teachers from two Tanzanian higher education institutions. Of 487 completed questionnaires, 22 were excluded because of highly repetitive response patterns, resulting in a final analytic sample of 465 participants. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted, and indirect associations were examined using 2,000 bootstrap resamples. Curriculum quality, faculty support, and peer support were positively associated with beliefs in SEL (β = 0.19, 0.39, and 0.29, respectively) and directly associated with SEC (β = 0.20, 0.24, and 0.20, respectively; all p ≤ 0.002). Beliefs in SEL were positively associated with SEC (β = 0.42, p < 0.001). Curriculum quality (β = 0.08), faculty support (β = 0.16), and peer support (β = 0.12) also showed significant indirect associations with SEC through beliefs in SEL, while the corresponding direct associations remained significant. The model accounted for 63.9% of the variance in beliefs in SEL and 90.6% of the variance in SEC. The high intercorrelations among the environmental factors and the large explained variance require cautious interpretation. The findings provide a context-specific application and modest refinement of Social Cognitive Theory by distinguishing curriculum, faculty, and peer support as complementary environmental pathways and identifying beliefs in SEL as a potential domain-specific cognitive mechanism. A preliminary implementation framework is proposed for future evaluation. Because the design was cross-sectional and relied on self-report, temporal and causal relationships cannot be established.