Culture Shock and Higher Education Performance: Implications for Teaching

Abstract

The globalisation of higher education brings together learners and teachers from differing systems, creating a heterogeneous and diverse environment.Yet many higher education institutions typically rely on foreign students themselves to adapt to their new higher education environments.An investigation was undertaken as to whether traditional approaches are effective and efficient in meeting the needs of the internationally mobile student. Using data from the last ten years (1999 to 2009) from a post-1992 University in the North West of England an analysis of over 15,000 postgraduate assessments found a significant performance difference between home country students and international mobile students. Results found that home country students perform significantly better than international students, although the latter perform better in examinations than in coursework. However, there is a substantive improvement during the dissertation stage for both groups. Possible reasons for such variations in performance are explored.

Animating the classroom: Pedagogical responses to internationalisation

“…The result is that international students report experiencing marginalisation (Simpson et al, 2010;Turner, 2006), anxiety (Currie, 2007;Valiente, 2008) and culture shock (Kelly and Moogan, 2012) in the classroom as they struggle to adjust to new teaching and learning methods, language barriers and an emphasis on critical analysis. Research suggests that Chinese students, in particular, experience difficulties when asked to engage in individualised debate in class (Simpson et al, 2010;Currie, 2007).…”

“…There is a growing call for taught PG programmes to move beyond the traditional approaches and to adapt to the needs of the international students (Kelly & Moogan, 2012;Valiente, 2008). Others stress the need to create better integration between UK and international students (Currie, 2007).…”

“…Turner's (2006) year-long study highlights the emotional stress and lack of confidence experienced by Chinese students on a taught MA programme, suggesting that many Chinese students spend the first semester acclimatising and only fully engage with course material in the second semester. Students may take a long time to make the transition from one pedagogy to another (Kelly and Moogan, 2012;Currie 2007). Because the UK institutions and individual academics rarely reflect on their own pedagogical biases (Currie, 2007;Simpson et al, 2010;Turner, 2006), in order to make a successful transition, international students need to learn how to negotiate specific discourses of knowledge and socio-political contexts (Cheng, 2013).…”

“…It was devised in response to student feedback about internationalisation and two of the authors' concerns about the difficulties they were experiencing when teaching topics such as organisational power, politics, leadership and ethics to MA Management students who had little work experience and were unfamiliar with the UK university system. Such learning and teaching challenges have been widely acknowledged by the internationalisation literature (Crose, 2011;Turner, 2006;Sun and Richardson, 2012) and there has been a growing call for programmes to move beyond traditional approaches and to adapt to the needs of international students (Kelly and Moogan, 2012;Valiente, 2008).…”

“…The workshops were intended as both a response to the needs of international students (Kelly and Moogan, 2012;Valiente, 2008) and an innovative approach to management education (Prichard, 2009). Firstly, we hoped to promote greater integration and socialisation of the student cohort, while giving them opportunities to think about the module content in new ways.…”