Graduate School Psychology Students’ Self Report on Multicultural Competence and Program Satisfaction

The percentage of culturally diverse students in public schools has increased and with this the need for multiculturally competent school psychologists has also increased. Despite the rigorous training that school psychologists receive, it has been discussed that graduate training factors impact the development of graduate students’ multicultural competence. Therefore, this study explored what training factors impact school psychology graduate students’ multicultural competence. This study found that the number of multicultural courses taken, and the ethnicity of practicum supervisors graduate students were exposed to were not significantly correlated with the development of graduate students’ multicultural competence. Furthermore, the ethnicity of graduate students did not impact their perception of the quality of training received. However, there was a significant correlation (r = .48) between the percentage of ethnically diverse students graduate students are exposed to and their multicultural competence. In addition, the number of ethnically diverse practicum supervisors (r = .46) and the number of ethnically diverse faculty members (r = .28) were positively correlated with perceptions of the quality of their multicultural training. Overall, this study evaluated training factors that have been found to impact the ability of training programs to train multiculturally competent school psychologists