Efficacy of Multicultural Education for Preschool Children

Abstract

The efficacy of multicultural curricula for the development of “racial expertise” was examined in 79 pre-school children. Children in preschools with multicultural and emergent curricula ( n = 43) were compared with children in preschools with multicultural but no emergent curricula ( n = 20) and children in preschools with neither multicultural nor emergent curricula ( n = 16) in their responses to the Multi-Response Racial Attitude Scale and domain-specific measures of racial groups knowledge. Results suggest children in preschools with both multicultural and emergent curricula have more domain-specific racial knowledge but not less biased attitudes than other preschool children.