Effects of Teachers’ Multicultural Professional Development on Reducing the Gaps in Students’ Global Competence: An Analysis of Global Competence Data for Korea in PISA 2018

This study aimed to examine the effect of students’ socioeconomic status (ESCS) on their global competence and to explore the moderating role of teachers’ multicultural professional development in reducing ESCS-based disparities. Using data from the 2018 PISA dataset, which includes 6,617 students across 188 schools in Korea, a two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis was conducted. The findings revealed that teachers’ multicultural professional development partially moderated the relationship between ESCS and global competence. Specifically, students with lower ESCS demonstrated higher levels of global competence when taught by teachers with greater levels of multicultural professional development. These results suggest that enhancing teachers’ multicultural capacity can serve as a meaningful policy strategy for promoting equity in global competence education.