Relationships Between Multicultural Beliefs, Multicultural Acceptance, and Cultural Diversity Competence Among Pre-service Early Childhood Teachers

This study aimed to investigate the levels of multicultural beliefs, multicultural acceptance, and cultural diversity competence among pre-service early childhood teachers, and to comprehensively analyze the relationships among these variables. A survey was conducted with 579 students from early childhood education departments at universities across the country. For data analysis, SPSS Statistics 29.0 was used to perform descriptive statistics(mean, standard deviation), correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, and path analysis. The findings are as follows: First, pre-service early childhood teachers demonstrated relatively high levels of multicultural beliefs, multicultural acceptance, and cultural diversity competence. Notably, within multicultural beliefs, the perception of student diversity showed the highest average. Second, a statistically significant positive correlation was found among pre-service early childhood teachers' multicultural beliefs, multicultural acceptance, and cultural diversity competence. Multiple regression analysis revealed that multicultural beliefs directly influenced both cultural diversity competence and multicultural acceptance, and that multicultural acceptance further influenced cultural diversity competence. Furthermore, pre-service early childhood teachers' multicultural beliefs and multicultural acceptance explained approximately 51.3% of the total variance in cultural diversity competence, with multicultural acceptance showing a higher explanatory power than multicultural beliefs. Based on these findings, this study proposes educational directions to strengthen the multicultural education competence of pre-service early childhood teachers.