July 17th 2:10-2:25 pm Room 3002 Canada is widely known as a country where students from all over the world are coming for their post-secondary education. Having international students benefits universities from various aspects, such as making a diverse atmosphere in campus and an economic contribution. This research examines miscommunication between international students, faculty, and staff led by cultural and value differences. It is important to raise an awareness of cultural backgrounds and the ways of communicating with them as there is an increase in international students. An online-based survey was conducted and distributed to students within the four streams at Vantage College to identify types of information received and expected to get from the recruiters as well as how clear it was. We hypothesize that miscommunication contributes to creating gaps between international students, faculty, and staff that might affect the students’ retention of staying in their current faculty.
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July 17th 3:00-3:15 pm Room 3002 Educational institutions have been expanding their businesses by attracting the increasing number of international students’ market. Some Universities have taken advantage of these students’ lack of efficient English and have created opportunities for them to endeavour their futures. University of British Columbia is one of the institutes that used this opportunity and founded Vantage College, a one year program for international students that do not meet this university’s english requirements but want a chance to succeed in one of Management, Arts, Science, and Engineering streams and smoothly transfer to UBC on their second year. However, almost every year Vantage College loses some of its students due to different and some unknown elements, especially in the Management stream. This stream only succeeded to retain half of its students in the third semester . In this research 80 students from both Management and Engineering faculties will be interviewed and later 10 students among them will be interviewed for a more in-depth analysis. We seek to investigate the influence of different factors on the retention rate in specifically Management and Engineering streams. This research further aims to find solutions to the potential issues for a higher success rate for both the institution and students.
July 17th 3:40-3:55 pm Room 3002 Vantage College is a new program set up by UBC which only provide to international students for their English learning. Students in Vantage are divided into four streams, Arts, Science, Management, and Engineering. Those students will study in UBC Vancouver campus in their first year, and then Arts and Science students can stay in Vancouver for their further study, while Management and Engineering students are mandatory to go to Okanagan campus after their first two semesters. Therefore, some students choose to leave, some of them transfer to another faculty, and others go to colleges. The students’ retention becomes an urgent problem for managers in Vantage College. This research mainly examines students’ preference and reasons that make them want to transfer, and give advises based on the results. In this research, the participations are whole Vantage Management and Engineering students, who will be asked to complete questionnaires. The questionnaire would mostly concentrate on students’ preference and retention of second-year study, through asking them if they would transfer or stay in Kelowna, and the reason they make their choice. We hypothesize that the choice of participates made are relied on their academic situation, engineering students who prefer to transfer to Vancouver will contain a large proportion than management students, and their preference and choice may mostly influence by the location of faculty.
July 17th 4:35-4:50 pm Room 3002 International college program is a relatively new educational program for university campus to help international students on language difficulty and to adapt new learning environment. Vantage College is one of the international program in UBC. In Vantage program, to easily manages four different streams including arts, science, engineering, and management, the college provides standard timetable and certain course arrangement for each stream. Course arrangement may be related to students’ sense of belongingness toward and the understanding of the faculty, which could be associated with students’ willingness of staying in the program or the faculty. Since students’ involvement in the faculty may affects the well-being and satisfaction of students’ experience in university (Whitchurch & Gordon, 2010), students’ engagement should be taken into consideration among any kinds of educational organization. The objective of our research is to identify the impacts of course arrangement on students’ feelings of belongingness towards their faculty and their understanding of the future major or faculty after the end of the first formal academic year (first two terms). We collected data about Vantage students’ feelings towards their faculty timetable and course arrangement from each stream by using online survey to examine course management in students’ perspectives, develop a more effective timetable and benefits future Vantage students. Moreover, those data might be valuable resources and advices for the future development of timetable planning especially for management stream.
References Whitchurch, C., & Gordon, G. (2010). Diversifying academic and professional identities in higher education: Some management challenges. Tertiary Education and Management, 16(2), 129-144. doi:10.1080/13583881003757029 July 17th 1:50-2:05 pm Room 3002 This study is aimed to inquire possible solutions that address retention issues relating to orientation of international students. The annual expenditure by international students contributes to substantial amount of economic growth in Canada. This trend requires an environment that values diversity. Former study has demonstrated the importance of diversity through increasing thinking complexity and academic dynamic. Consequently, several educational institutions have established their special program supporting international students especially English as second language students. Nevertheless, a few international programs in some Canadian universities have suffered from low retention rate. Previous study has revealed the effectiveness of retention practice of economic disadvantage domestic students, however, few research focus on the retention problems of cultural minority students. The purpose of the study is to explore the current issues in first year orientation that may relate to the retention rate by program. In this study, consumer relationship management was adopted which considers international students as consumers and the agencies (e.g. registration process, student service, and information system) in touch with consumers are important factors to build and fix consumer relationships. SWOT analysis was used at the beginning of the research to disclose current situation of orientation program with the focus on international students. Pre-survey including all current V-MGMT students was conducted with the purpose of finding the most salient and common issues—information, confidence, and belonging. The following survey explored the salience of each issue and students’ further perceptions of feasibilities of possible solutions.
July 17th 1:30-1:45 pm Room 3002 Recent studies suggest that international students are more likely to experience culture shock when they first arrived a new country that is unfamiliar to them, especially if the culture is different from their owns. Thus, this research project targets to study how international students go through culture shock in their initial period spent in a new country and how social support may help international students to adjust culture shock. Our research participants are current Vantage students from four streams: Arts, Applied Science, Science, and Management. A questionnaire with 13 questions is provided to each subject to collect their inner journey in their first semester to adapt Canadian university culture as well as the social support they got or used to expect. The hypothesis is that it would be easier for international students to overcome culture shock and adapt a new circumstance if more social support is provided. This paper tries to figure Vantage students’ needs out for social support in the beginning period so that students’ experiences can be improved by satisfying their needs.
July 17th 3:20-3:35 pm Room 3002 The way in which employees within companies work and the cultural environment they face every day is not totally different from that of students within universities. Interestingly, the globalized world of the twenty first century has gather individuals from diverse cultures and national backgrounds in just one place. Employees as well as students face the challenge of working and establishing an environment in which they can work together despite their different national backgrounds. Vantage College represents one of these diverse places in which students break their national barriers to create an environment of learning and integration. As employees from a company, each student also strives to find and understand the different ways of working and together take the maximum advantage of their educational institute: Vantage College. Therefore, the aim of this research is to understand whether and how the majority group of students from one national background could exert some influence on the minority group of students’ relationship building, confidence working within the program and their desire of staying in it. The sample of the research is conformed by Vantage One students from the Science, Arts, Applied Science and Management streams who completed an online survey regarding the topics of the research.
July 17th 4:55-5:10 pm Room 3002 In our study, we want to explore the possible relationship between the stress level and academic performance among students, since previous research has indicated that the business performance is highly associated with stressors, also present studies found that stress is a main factor that might causes employees’ efficiency in workplace (Kariv, 2008). we conducted an anonymous online survey for all Management and Engineering first-year international students. The survey contains 5 questions about their stress level and types of stress, also how does stress influence their performance; the second part of the survey has 5 academic questions about Management or Engineering lectures in order to test their performance in the class. After that, students were required to finish a few questions about their feelings toward the quiz they had and their stress level after completing the quiz. We assumed that stress would have negative influence on students’ academic performance on the test. Since first-year students would eventually graduate from university and work in the company, knowing the relationship between stress level and performance would show the direction and address gap for them to deal with the stress perceived in the workplace and thus achieved the working goals more efficiently.
References Kariv, D. (2008). The Relationship between Stress and Business Performance among Men and Women Entrepreneurs. Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship; Regina, 21(4), 449–476,505. July 17th 4:15-4:30 pm Room 3002 Exams are part of students’ lives, however, several researchers showed that high expectations on, time spent on and perceived workload from studying could influence students’ mental well being (Rubio-Valdehita, López-Higes & Díaz-Ramiro, 2014; Bachman & Bachman, 2006; Scully & Kerr, 2014).
Therefore, this topic is about whether the exams created an exhausted situation for Vantage students compare among faculties and intervened the students’ normal performance during the tests, or the tests could help students to familiar with styles of final exams and they didn’t have a bad influence on students’ self-perceptions of mental wellness. During designing stage, the project is a close-ended survey. In the survey, questions are arranged into four parts. The first part collects necessary information about faculties, nationalities and personalities of participants; the rest three parts are based on before, during and after the weeks contained lots of midterms, in addition, some of them try to measure physical and mental fitness, some measure self-perceptions of participants’ mental states and others measure the students’ self-perceptions of multiple performance measurement, such as exams. References Bachman, L., & Bachman, C. (2006). STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF ACADEMIC WORKLOAD IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 271- 304.RetrievedApril1, 2017, from http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=7b7c2907-59ec-416a-b049-42a140454864%40sessionmgr4008&hid=4114 Rubio-Valdehita, S., López-Higes, R., & Díaz-Ramiro, E. (2014). Academic Context and Perceived Mental Workload of Psychology Students. Spanish Journal of Psychology, 17. doi:10.1017/sjp.2014.57 Scully, G., & Kerr, R. (2014). Student Workload and Assessment: Strategies to Manage Expectations and Inform Curriculum Development. Accounting Education, 23(5), 443-466. doi:10.1080/09639284.2014.947094 July 17th 4:00-4:15 pm Room 3002 In current educational environment, adjustment of transition from high school to university becomes one of the most significant causes for first year university students’ stress (Stallman & Hurst, 2016). This may influence students’ wellbeing in the long term. Taking into consideration various solutions to this problem, workshops may play a significant role in addressing students’ wellbeing by clarifying the existing issues and giving them detailed guidelines. Specifically, our study aims at investigating the attendance rate and exploring the most functional presenting styles of workshops in universities. As students’ low attendance rate and perceived low efficacy of workshops may lead to less efficient assistance on students’ physical and mental health as well as academic performance, our study could make a difference by pointing out students’ common needs and desirable presentation forms through online surveys. Based on Yoong et al.’s (2013) study of participants’ preference for attending brainstorm-oriented workshops, we hypothesized that students would be more interested in workshops that emphasize students’ engagement rather than theoretical lectures.
References Stallman, H. M. & Hurst, C. P. (2016).The university stress scale: measuring domains and extent of stress in university students. Journal of Psychology, 51, 128-134. doi:10.1111/ap.12127 Yoong, S. L., Wolfenden, L., Finch, M., Williams, A., Dodds, P., Gillham, K., & Wyse, R. (2013). A randomised controlled trial of an active telephone-based recruitment strategy to increase childcare-service staff attendance at a physical activity and nutrition training workshop. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 24(3), 224-226. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1071/HE13055 |