Our current work seeks to provide direct empirical evidence on whether Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote dialectical thinking. We collected behavioral data from 258 Chinese international students studying in multiple regions. We found that there was a main effect among the four conditions (i.e., studying abroad, exposure to foreign culture, hometown, and typical day). More specifically, when primed with studying abroad or typical day (relative to hometown culture), participants were more likely to show tolerance for contradiction by deeming both sides of contradictory scientific statements as convincing and rating them more favorably. Therefore, it is plausible that Chinese international students’ experiences studying abroad promote their dialectical thinking. More work is needed to further this line of research by (1) extending these effects with other measures of dialectical thinking such as perception of interconnectedness and prediction of change, (2) adopting differing paradigms to provide more robust findings, and (3) probing the underlying processes as to why experiences studying abroad promote dialectical thinking.

This study examined the effects of opportunity to learn (OTL) or the content coverage in mathematics on student mathematics anxiety, problem-solving performance, and mathematics performance. The pathways examining the influences of OTL on student problem-solving performance and mathematics performance via mathematics anxiety were also tested. A sample of 1,676 students from Shanghai-China, and a sample of 1,511 students from the United States who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 were used for the analyses. The results from multilevel models and path models supported our hypotheses that OTL not only showed significant direct effects on student mathematics anxiety, problem-solving performance, and mathematics performance, but also presented indirect effects on student problem-solving performance and mathematics performance via mathematics anxiety in both Shanghai-China and United States, controlling for student gender, grade, and socioeconomic status. The practical implications of the current results were also discussed.