Reading Persuasive Texts Affects Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs About Cultural Diversity in the Classroom

Abstract

Research has suggested that teachers’ beliefs toward culturally diverse classrooms are affected during teacher education. Text reading, as one of the major learning activities in initial teacher education, is supposed to affect teachers’ educational concepts and beliefs. We conducted two experiments to test the impact of reading a positively or negatively oriented persuasive text about diversity on preservice teachers’ belief change. In Study 1 ( N = 42), we found that belief change varied significantly as a function of the direction of the text condition, and that the reading of the texts led to a significantly stronger belief change if the text was in alignment with participants’ prior beliefs. Study 2 ( N = 57) revealed a middle-sized but non-significant moderator effect for prior knowledge ( p = .08, [Formula: see text] = .06), suggesting that participants with more prior knowledge were less likely to be persuaded by the text. The results provide new insights into factors that may affect the development of preservice teachers’ diversity beliefs.