The Effect of Multicultural Education on Preservice Teachers’ Attitude and Efficacy: Testing Bank’s Content Integration Dimension

Abstract

The sudden increase in diversity in the public schools has caught teacher preparation institutions unprepared. The situation has led to a need to develop instructional interventions to help pre-service teachers get ready for a new context that they will be facing for the first time. Multicultural education can be of great importance to address the issues related to diversities. In order to create multicultural environments at schools, all the actors of the educational area need skills to better communicate with students from different cultures. One of the most important topics during the teacher training process is equipping the pre-service teachers with the necessary skills, attitudes, and information to teach in multicultural environments. To this end, designing a teacher-training curriculum to raise pre-service teachers' multicultural efficacy levels is essential. In this quasi-experimental study, we investigated the effects of a 10-week multicultural education intervention carried out through Bank’s content integration process. Fifty-two pre-service teachers enrolled at the department of social sciences in a state university in Turkey participated in the study. Findings indicated a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the pre-service teachers in the experimental group, who attended the 10-week course, in terms of their multicultural attitude and efficacy. It was concluded that the multicultural education intervention, carried out according to Bank's content integration dimension, significantly affected pre-service teachers' multicultural attitude and efficacy