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

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