Multicultural and Diversity Issues: Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers' Attitudes and Knowledge

The purpose of this study was to ascertain teachers' multicultural knowledge, cross-cultural perceptions, and attitudes about different cultures as a function of both pre-service professional preparation and graduate education curriculum. Accomplishing this goal required administration of the Multicultural/Diversity Scale?Revised (MCR) at pre/post points. Data were collected from 90 pre-service and 90 in-service teachers. Inquirers used a quantitative descriptive statistical design to analyze these data. Reliability was computed on the instrument which indicated a .90 index. The data collected in this study indicated a significant difference among pre-service students in the category of Acceptance for pre-test data; however, no significant difference emerged in this category for posttest data. Inquirers surmised the difference was not present in posttest data due to the instruction administered during the course between pre-test and posttest data collection.