Research Centre for Learning and Teaching

Projects

Postgraduate study in Newcastle: the inter-cultural experience (PG-Nice)

Recruitment, retention and completion of international postgraduate students are indicators of a University’s research health.

Recruitment, retention and completion of international postgraduate students are indicators of a University’s research health. In addition to making important contributions academically and financially, these students are a barometer of our worldwide standing. Anecdotal experience suggests that our international students can be confronted with cultural and linguistic difficulties, and we hypothesise they affect learning gain. To provide future students with the best experience, we will investigate the linguistic and cultural challenges of our students and how they affect postgraduate academic performance so we can improve it for the benefit of the students and the institution.

Students and student involvement are central to this study. First, students are at the core of data collection: we will learn about students’ postgraduate experiences from focus groups and interviews in workshops that every student in ICM and many in HaSS and SAgE will have the opportunity to contribute to. Second, a reference group of students will co-design specific interventions that benefit students with particular profiles associated with lower academic performance. In the shorter term, we will provide a forum for students to raise immediate issues that will help develop our current practice. We will develop a plan for the longer term, where we will implement and evaluate the interventions in a prospective study. Third, to operationalise the project, we will offer internships to salaried summer interns. The interns will be based in ICM, and managed by the project lead (KJ) and appropriate scientific lead (MD/JC). They will be exposed to the Institute management as well as having the opportunity to develop, report and publish their own scientific methods as part of a scientific team as described later. Finally, the project will support the academic development of KJ as a PGR student (MPhil/PhD). 

Nature of activity

In her recent keynote address to the Learning & Teaching Conference, Prof Suzanne Cholerton defined our mission to ‘Provide an inclusive and international collaborative learning opportunity’. She said that skills are not future-proof, and that the most important attributes of our students will be the attitude and mindset they bring to their studies and to their working lives. Cultural competence is the ability to embrace diverse values, beliefs, and feelings. In a teaching environment, immersion in foreign culture doesn’t always lead to competence. We know from theory and literature that through positive intercultural encounters, students ameliorate their foreign language skills (Aba, 2016); students with intercultural experience are more open-minded and respectful to behaviours of different cultures (Lussier, 2009; Penbek, Yurdakul & Cerit, 2012). The University must deliver a postgraduate experience to meet the cultural needs of recipients. An open mindset from student and University alike are better predictors of learning gain.

In postgraduate research, opportunities to build competence are more limited, often to the immediate peer group. Assessments are widely time-spaced with less structured measurement of progress by exams and assignments, in favour of an annual interview with panel members. This is against a backdrop of increased financial pressure to recruit; an international PhD has high value to the University. There is limited formal recruitment screening of self-funding students, with concessions in language (IELTS) or some academic qualifications. Nevertheless many international students thrive, but a minority struggle and ultimately fail.

We wish to understand why this is, to improve the postgraduate experience for all our students. We have assembled a cross-faculty, cross-disciplinary team:

- To describe the linguistic and cultural factors that affect our postgraduate students.

- To develop interventions that improve students’ development, and outcomes to measure them.

- To design an intervention study around a team equipped to put these interventions into practice.

The endpoints will be: a proposal of interventions to respond to the diverse needs of our postgraduate students, improving their experience and academic outcomes; and a prospective study design to implement and assess these interventions.

Methodological approach

AIM 1: describe the linguistic and cultural factors that affect our postgraduate students

We have developed a qualitative approach to understanding the factors affecting our students, and their relationship with a thriving postgraduate career and positive outcome.

In-programme workshops: JC & her CfLaT team will train 4 interns to design and facilitate 6 qualitative workshops of 2 hrs duration. We will collect rich data on perceptions and experiences of inter-cultural and linguistic aspects of student life. The workshops will comprise practical activities, with visual data collection to stimulate reflection and group discussion. Themes include: home country/culture of student and mindset/expectations; students’ personal experiences, including expectations and barriers/facilitators; mind-set and experiences of integration and language learning.

Sample: We will recruit 10 in-programme participants per workshop, two workshops per faculty. EU and International PG students will be represented at all stages of study (all years, writing up, part/fulltime, etc.). The workshops include whole-cohort activities and sub-group work for eg. first years, EU students, etc. Workshops will run 10-12 noon and then 1-3pm; we offer lunch from 12-1pm for networking and recruitment of reference groups for co-design work.

Analysis and reporting: The team will facilitate and record the workshops in real-time to minimise data collection costs, and will take joint responsibility for thematic and activity analysis to develop the findings. Data will be triangulated with current contextual literature, and by interview with 2 PG directors per faculty.

Induction workshop: SG will bring an innovative workshop to a cohort of students recruited from ICM’s October induction, to catalyse our future work. The LEGO Serious Play method (LSP) is a facilitated thinking, communication and problem-solving technique for organisations, teams and individuals. It draws on extensive research from the fields of Business, and Organisational Development, Psychology and Learning, and is based on the concept of "hand knowledge". The method has an underpinning core process and topics are explored via application techniques (AT). This workshop will focus participants on a negotiated topic related to the project using A1 and A2 techniques. The approach will be used to tap into the human ability to describe and make sense of a situation at hand, to initiate change and improvement and even to create something new. In future we will follow up this cohort to evaluate their development and our interventions.

 

AIM 2: develop interventions that improve students’ development, and outcomes to measure them

Reference group recruitment: As described earlier, we will recruit a diverse reference group of students from the workshops to help in our co-design activities.

Co-design workshops: With consultancy support if needed, we will hold 2 co-design workshops with the reference group. We will take ideas from the earlier workshops and refine them by participative design into a package of interventions. At this stage we will re-interview the PG directors to validate the interventions for their personal collaboration with international students. Given the wide participation we expect the interventions will be effective, but also pragmatic and achievable for the PG team and the University.

Outcome assessment package: Using central University resources – notably Business Warehouse and ePortfolio - we will develop demographic and other descriptive information that may be indicative of a thriving postgraduate career and good learning outcome. These will include: adverse and positive factors in progression reviews; time to completion; writing proficiency by WordSmith Tools, and final degree award. We will include potential outcome predictors for future quantitative explanatory work: gender; age; country or region of domicile; IELTS score and factors emerging from workshops e.g. lab location, type of project. We will take a cross-faculty sample of the proposed data in order to pilot the quantitative measures.

AIM 3: design an intervention study around a team built to put these interventions into practice

Intervention study: Using the PICO (population-intervention-comparator-outcome) model, we will develop a study design to use the interventions and outcome measures developed in the previous work packages. The exact design will depend on the nature of the interventions proposed.

Team building: With Institutional and academic support, KJ (by training, a linguist) has agreed to lead the research and we have requested funding for an MPhil to support her academic development. The subject will be around learning gain, and its relation with cultural competence and mindset. The cross-faculty team offer ongoing supervisory support, and we expect this to develop towards implementation.

Strategic planning: With follow-on funding the team will seek to implement the intervention study. We would look to convert KJ’s MPhil to a PhD, appropriate for implementation and early assessment of interventions. Strategically it offers continuity for the team and the work, and alignment between KJ’s substantive role in our Institute and the aims of the project.

Contact

For further information contact:
Jill Clark, Principal Investigator.
Email: Jill.Clark@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: 0191 208 5637