Integration Problems: First Year International Students Face
The paper titled “‘Part of the Community?’
First Year International Students and Their Engineering Teams”, was written by Tom Joyce & Clare Hopkins in June 2014, discusses the social and cultural integration problems that first year international students face and the adjustments that these new incoming students have to make. Their target audience was first year university students engaged in the engineering team system, a group project held in the first year of mechanical engineering at Newcastle University. The teams are made up of international (students coming from outside the EU), non-UK European Union (EU) and EU students.
After 3 years of the implementation of the engineering teams system, the university wished to understand which student group found the system the most challenging. From a detailed evaluation, international students were one group whose experience in the program was revealed as different from their peers. This prompted actions from the university due to the fact that over the decade between 2001/2002 and 2010/2011 the number of non-EU students accepted nationally into mechanical engineering increased by 64.5%.
In order to further understand the problem at hand, the authors had two research methods: quantitative approaches: surveys and qualitative approaches: focus groups, that allowed the students to participate either face to face or remotely. The research instruments touched upon topics such as their team experience, details of their home country, their previous educational experience including whether they had worked in teams, their attitudes to group working and their hopes for studies in school. From their surveys and focus groups, the authors found that most anticipated a positive learning experience in regards to the engineering teams. Although largely positive, they felt that the team experience could be improved. Three common themes arose from the analysis of the data collected.
First, communication difficulties was identified, in both understanding and being understood. Second, feelings of exclusion stood out. Participants described not being included in conversations both socially and academically. Third, being unable to express and comprehend was thought to be attached to the feelings of exclusion but also led to the participants losing confidence and resulted in them hesitating to take part in team discussions and putting forwards their ideas. The researchers proposed 3 interventions:
- having multiple international students in a team,
- that all students have the opportunity to meet socially and interact and
- that students are made aware of that “international communication is everyone’s responsibility”.
Even though problems and solutions were identified, the study was limited by the fact that only one group of students participated and the study was focused on problems faced by international students.
