Page 131 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience
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face challenges in interactions and relationships at the administrative, academic, and support services levels. Taken together, these findings argue for making integration and language support a central aspect of support services, courses, and curriculum, ultimately leading to higher engagement and satisfaction.
Support services need to consider the diverse needs of international students and develop programs that promote integration. For example, East Asian students are often familiar with timed exams and may find other, more holistic assessment methods unfamiliar (Badur, 2003). Wu and Hammond (2011) point out that “Confucian education emphasizes effort, which often translates into memorization and rote learning. This contrasts with a more dialogic Western education in which students are encouraged to ask questions, challenge the ideas of the teacher and other students, and express their own ideas. Not surprisingly, East Asian students can find the dialogic approach disconcerting. They are described as ‘quiet’ in the classroom and do not contribute to seminars or group discussions, much less challenge their teachers or classmates” (p. 424). Teachers need to be aware of and responsive to the situation of international and domestic students in their classes. In this way, they can design courses in a way that promotes integration and allows domestic students to be ‘buddies’ with international students, which will also improve their language skills.
The strong role of integration in the student experience also lends potential explanatory power to other findings. For example, the results of another study in this paper show that satisfaction is higher at universities with a lower proportion of international students. Friendships with host country nationals have been shown to reduce psychological problems among immigrants (Furnham & Li, 1993). In turn, integration with native students has been associated with higher satisfaction, among other benefits (Rohrlich & Martin, 1991), and satisfaction with relationships with host nationals is associated with higher well-being and satisfaction. Considering integration as one of the fundamental components of the student experience, it must be placed at the center of theory and practice.
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Discussion and Conclusions
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