Does Teacher Multicultural Training Matter? Evidence from the U.S. Scores on Pisa 2015
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Date
2018-10
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Abstract
The racial and ethnic achievement gap in the USA ranges from about 3 to 5 years of schooling. Existing research about diversity in education has focused on studying the effect of matching students with teachers of the same culture or gender, and the different mechanisms that mediate those effects, including bias, stereotypes and prejudices. Multicultural competence training has been an essential part of work training and professional development in the military and business industries. In the field of teacher education, it has also been discussed and incorporated to some extent but there is no research about the effectiveness of the training and its impact on student performance. This study takes opportunity of the new teacher questionnaire from PISA 2015, a large-scale international assessment study administered every 3 years to 15-year-old children around the world to measure their performance in reading, math and science. Using multilevel analysis, the effect of multicultural training on the student’s performance in science was measured for immigrant and native students in the USA. The results show that multicultural training has no significant effect on student performance in science, even after accounting for the economic, social and cultural status of students and schools, and common indicators of teacher quality.
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education gap, teacher multicultural training, teacher expectations, teacher bias, multilevel analysis