Generally Korean parents tend to put a lot of pressure on their children to prepare for school from a very early age (Lee & Kim, 2010; Seo et al., 2010; Seo & Moon, 2012).  This preparation primarily consists of basic numeracy and literacy skills and learning of English. It is, however, contradicting to the contention that early childhood is a time when a variety of developmentally appropriate stimuli should be provided through continuous and qualitative interactions with significant others such parents or teachers. 

  Given the importance of early years on child development, there is new move or initiative to redefine or reframe the concept of early learning in research and practice in Korea.  At the core of the discussion about the importance of early childhood education and care is the consensus that teachers are considered potentially significant as early intervention agents, because young children spend a significant amount of their time in early childhood and care settings (Arnold, McWilliams, & Arnold, 1998; Seo & Moon, 2013).  Due to the emerging recognition of the role played by teachers in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, teachers and educators in that field need to be well equipped with both appropriate teaching skills and socio-emotional competence, so that they can provide the behavioral and emotional support their young students require to learn and grow (Stormont, Beckner, Mitchell, & Richter, 2005; Seo & Moon, 2013).

  Keeping with the importance of teacher's role in young children's outcomes, a stream of research has shed light on the psychological aspect of teachers' rather than direct teaching practices or methods related to children's learning. Grounded from Bandura's social learning theory, over the last few decades, researchers have investigated the direct and indirect effects of teaching efficacy on teachers and children.  Intuitively, high and low efficacy teachers exhibit different patterns of teacher behavior in the classroom, and this proposition has been empirically supported by Western studies with a sample of students in primary education settings.  In parallel, with a sample of Korean teachers and young children, Son and Sun (2014) investigated the effects of teacher’s self-efficacy on children’s sociality (4–5 years old) and they found that teachers’ self-efficacy belief had significant indirect effects on children’s sociality through job satisfaction and quality teacher–child interaction.  This finding suggests that a higher level of teaching efficacy may contribute to greater job-satisfaction and more positive teacher–child interaction, leading to children’s outcome of increased sociability.  Using this line of reasoning, it could hypothesize that teacher’s teaching efficacy would affect the children’s learning-related behavior directly or indireclty, although there is the very few research to investigate this plausible hypothesis, except for the one study by Sohn(2014).  Sohn (2014) found that teacher's teaching efficacy and professionalism were found to be predictive to children's learning-related behavior, but the results pertaining to effects of child's age and teacher's education on the children's learning-related behavior were contracting to the expectation with a samll sample size of Korean preschoolers. Therefore, the main research objectives of this study were to examine the combined effects of the study variables of interest on the dependent variable of children's learning-related behavior. Furthermore, the mediational role of teacher's teaching efficacy in the relation between the children's learning-related behavior and teachers' percieved levels of professionalism was investigated.  

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