Integrated Pedagogy and Socio-Emotional Development in Preschool Education: A Systematic Narrative Review of Evidence from 2010–2025

Abstract

Socio-emotional development in preschool education is central to children's emotional regulation, empathy, peer interaction and readiness for later learning. This systematic narrative review was based on PRISMA 2020 reporting guidelines, and sought to summarise evidence regarding integrated pedagogical practices in preschool and early-childhood settings. Scientific databases that were searched included: Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, PubMed and manual searches. The review period was 2010–2025. A total of 19 reports were excluded from the synthesis following date-range verification and 138 reports after eligibility assessment were excluded from the synthesis, leaving 133 reports for the synthesis. Due to variation in design, intervention format, outcome measures and educational context, a thematic narrative approach was used, along with VOS viewer-based keyword/term co-occurrence mapping. According to the synthesis, there was a presence of social-emotional learning and self-regulation support, storytelling and dialogic work, arts and movement, play-based and guided-play, as well as technology supported activities in the eligible literature. Associations reported of the integrated pedagogical approaches with the socio-emotional domains (emotional regulation, empathy, interaction with peers, social competence, classroom adjustment and self-management) included evidence. The conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt as the study-level design features, sample size, fidelity indicators, measures and formal risk-of-bias judgement varied. The review provides evidence for the importance of integrating socio-emotional learning objectives into play, expression, dialog and cooperative activities, as well as teacher mediated classroom routines, and suggests a need for more studies with longitudinal designs, experimental designs, and culturally relevant designs.