Association of teacher training, multicultural beliefs, and self-efficacy with teacher attitude towards immigrants: a cross-country study

Attitude towards immigrant students is an important dimension of cultural diversity and inclusiveness in the classroom, with a teacher’s beliefs about immigrants and immigration-related issues associated with immigrant students’ academic outcomes, socio-emotional development, and stereotype reinforcement. In this study, we used multiple linear regression to examine the association of training on global competency, multicultural and egalitarian beliefs, and self-efficacy in multicultural environments, with attitude towards immigrants using a large-scale sample of high school teachers, n = 45,756 from 16 countries. Our results suggest that multicultural and egalitarian beliefs, and self-efficacy in multicultural environments are both positively associated with such attitude, with our empirical models explaining as much as a third of the total variation in this outcome. A major contribution is that diversity-related factors have different associations with teacher attitudes, which implies that school administrators should prioritize those factors that matter the most when designing teacher diversity training and development.