Longitudinal Study of Preservice Teachers' Cultural Beliefs and Proposed Instructional Practices

• In Event: 61.074 - Goal Orientation in Context: Individual, Contextual, and Cultural Dimensions of Achievement Goal Theory

Abstract

The cultural landscape of United States is fast changing. As a result, culturally pluralistic schools and classrooms have replaced monocultural schools and classrooms. Studies indicate that most teachers bring very little cross-cultural experience to the classroom (Valli, 1995) and White teachers, in particular, may experience deep ambivalence toward minority and less affluent students (Hollins & Torres-Guzman, 2005). Student characteristics such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity may also evoke teachers’ prejudicial attitudes and biased achievement expectations (Jussim & Harber, 2005; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007; Weinstein, 2002). Teacher education programs bear the responsibility of educating prospective teachers to reflect critically on their attitudes and beliefs toward culturally diverse students and to endorse instructional practices that are likely to promote optimal student motivation for learning.
This study, therefore, employed an accelerated longitudinal design to examine if the extent of time spent in a teacher education program informs preservice teachers’ proposed instructional practices, namely mastery and performance-focused, their feelings of discomfort with student diversity, and stereotype beliefs regarding minority students. Sample items for each scale are presented in Table 1. For twelve consecutive semesters, data were collected each semester in three courses that all pre-service teachers were required to take at the beginning (freshmen), middle (after their first and before their final semester), and at the end of their teacher preparation (student teaching), respectively. Thus, pre-service teachers at all levels of their teacher preparation program could be included in the study. Table 2 shows the available data for each semester, including data from participants who had participated at more than one wave (about 20% of the sample). The presented analyses use the full sample of 2128 pre-service teachers; all analyses could be replicated using only the longitudinal sample.
Descriptive information about the four types of beliefs examined in the present study is provided in Figure 1. Growth curve analyses were conducted to examine how pre-service teachers’ beliefs about mastery- and performance-focused classroom practices change over time as these students progress through their teacher education program. Endorsement of stereotype beliefs and discomfort with student diversity were included as time-varying covariates. Unconditional means models indicated that the ICCs were.44 for performance practices, .47 for mastery practices; .51 for discomfort with diversity, and .56 for stereotype beliefs about minority students; accordingly, about 44%, 47%, 51%, and 56% of the variation in each of these beliefs was due to inter-individual differences. The analyses suggested that a quadratic model fit the data best for mastery practices while performance practices were fairly stable after the initial decrease. Stereotype beliefs about minority students and discomfort with diversity were associated with decreased endorsement of mastery-focused practices and increased endorsement of performance-focused practices, suggesting that biased preservice teachers are less likely to endorse classroom practices that promote optimal motivation to learn among their students.

Authors

• Revathy Kumar, University of Toledo

• Fani Lauermann, University of Bonn