The purpose of this study is to analyze the correlation among elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies, and to investigate how multicultural sensitivity affects ...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the correlation among elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies, and to investigate how multicultural sensitivity affects multicultural teaching efficacy and multicultural education competencies.
The research problems of this study are as follows.
First, how are elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies?
Second, what are the relations among elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies?
Third, what is the influence of elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity on multicultural teaching efficacy?
Fourth, what is the influence of elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity on multicultural teaching competencies?
In order to investigate the above research problems, 250 elementary school teachers in Incheon were surveyed with questionnaires, and 204 of them which were answered faithfully were analyzed.
In this study, to evaluate multicultural sensitivity, multicultural sensitivity scale validated by Lee, G. (2011) and Kang, J. (2015) based on multicultural sensitivity measure by Hammer, Bennett, and Wiseman was used. To evaluate multicultural teaching efficacy, multicultural teaching efficacy scale validated by Lee, G. (2011) and Kim, H. (2014) based on multicultural teaching efficacy measure by Guyton and Wesche (2005) was used. To evaluate multicultural education competencies, multicultural education competency scale validated by Park, J. (2014) and Kang, J. (2015) on the basis of MECA (Multicultural Education Cultural Assessment) by Boyd (2013) and MTCS (Multicultural Teaching Competency Scale) for measuring multicultural education competencies by Spanierman (2011).
SPSS 21.0 was used for data processing and analysis of this study, and to investigate the research problems, and descriptive statistical techniques were used for the basic data. Also, to investigate the relations among elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies, correlation analysis was conducted, and to investigate the influence of elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity on multicultural teaching efficacy and multicultural education competencies, multiple regression analysis was used.
The investigation results are as follows.
First, the correlation analysis among elementary school teachers’ multicultural sensitivity, multicultural teaching efficacy, and multicultural education competencies showed there is a statistically significant correlation between every two of them.
Second, multiple regression analysis to investigate the influence of multicultural sensitivity on multicultural teaching efficacy and multicultural education competencies showed statistically significant explanatory power, which means that the higher the elementary school teacher’s multicultural sensitivity is, the higher the multicultural teaching efficacy and multicultural education competencies are.
Most of the previous studies only looked at either multicultural sensitivity or multicultural teaching efficacy as a variable that affects multicultural education competencies, but both multicultural sensitivity and multicultural teaching efficacy were investigated in this study. Thus, it is meaningful to confirm that both multicultural sensitivity and multicultural teaching efficacy have a positive influence on multicultural education competencies.
This study says that in order to improve multicultural education competencies, the teacher has to respect different cultures as well as enjoy activities in which individuals of different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. Support and efforts are needed to raise awareness of multiculturalism and improve attitudes toward multicultural students. For mutual understanding and cooperation and, furthermore, to foster mutual respect in various groups, it is necessary to improve teachers’ multicultural sensitivity and multicultural efficacy with the support of schools and society as well as efforts at an individual level.