Examining and predicting ethnocultural empathy of preservice classroom teachers

This study aims to define and examine ethnocultural empathy level of preservice classroom teachers. The research design of this study was non-experimental and causal-comparative, which seeks to find relationships between independent and dependent variables after an action or event occurred. Participants were 434 preservice classroom teachers studying in Primary School Education Programme in the Department of Elementary Education at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in the academic year of 2017-2018. Turkish version of The Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (TSEE), which was initially developed by Wang, et al. [1] and then adopted to Turkish language by Özdikmenli-Demir & Demir [2] was conducted to measure ethnocultural empathy level of preservice classroom teachers. Results showed that ethnocultural empathy level of preservice teachers differed by gender, grade level, ethnic origin, family income and place of growth. Only three predictors; ‘being experienced in multicultural environments’, ‘grade level’ and ‘being in the majority group’ showed significance in the regression equation in this study. © 2019 by authors, all rights reserved.