(Although this post appears as having been published on Feb 11, 2017, like the others below it was originally posted here in November of 2015, and accompanied our JALT presentation at that time. I have kept most of the original phrasing.)
This post is about some of the things we were most interested in sharing at JALT 2015, and focuses only on those findings. Further below you can also find pdf versions of the charts on our poster (with more detailed numbers than you’ll find in this post), a discussion of what we did to get these results, and links to previous work we did as well as a brief introduction to a project we are working on now.
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In 2013 we (Stephen Shrader and Peter Edwards) presented the results of a survey we conducted with the help of colleagues at our university regarding what our students believe about study abroad. At that time we were primarily looking at whether students fell on the side of agreeing/disagreeing with statements about what they thought they would experience in classes overseas.
Since then we have been working on a new survey, and as part of the process we were looking at the 2013 dataset using some new tests. This time we are looking at how different subgroups of students in our sample responded when we examined their responses with cross tabulations (crosstabs). For this poster we are only discussing differences where we had at least 30 respondents in each subgroup and a statistically significant p-value (p < 0.01).
We tested for differences based on a wide range of things such as which program the student was in, their year, past study abroad experience (prior to university), and how they responded on other survey items (to see if some beliefs/attitudes corresponded with others). Interestingly, we found few correlations based on student background – most things that emerged seemed to be in how students answered certain survey items on beliefs/attitudes.
All our questions were about what students thought US university students do in regular content courses – not language courses.
Some of the things we found interesting in this data set:
Informal Debate
It seems that a majority of our students (79.1%) believe that informal debate (where individuals disagree and argue with each other, but without set teams or times) is common in US university classes.
With regard to this item, we found a correlation between student beliefs about how they think US students would feel about a professor that lectures. We found that our respondents who believe US students would think of a professor that lectures as strange/unusual are more likely to think informal debate is common.
Full Class Discussion Format
One of our questions asked about whether students believe full class discussion is more or less common than other discussion formats such as pair work or small group work. This item was trying to discover if students realize they might have to jump into discussions overseas without any kind of pair work as a warm-up, and participate in a discussion with everyone in the room listening. We found that 71.6 of our respondents think that full class discussion is more common than other discussion formats.
With regard to this item, one interesting thing was a difference in student attitudes about willingness to ask a teacher for clarification. We found that students who have a stronger tendency to be willing to ask a teacher for clarification in class were more likely to think full class discussion format is common, while students that say they would not be likely to raise their hands and ask for help were also more likely to think other discussion formats would be more common than full class discussion. (Perhaps a bit of wishful thinking here?)
Pair Work
One thing that concerned us is the large number of students that seemed to think pair work is common in US university content courses. Only 18.8% of our respondents seemed to think pair work is not something US university students do (again, we are not talking about language classes here, but content courses).
On this item we found a significant correlation between student beliefs about lecture. Unsurprisingly, students that think lecture is common are less likely to think of pair work as common. (The problem here, and what makes it interesting to us, is that many of the students do seem to think of pair work as common, while the majority think lecture is uncommon.)
Small Group Work
75.4% of our respondents fell on the side of saying small group work (in teams of 4-6) is common.
Again we found a correlation with student beliefs about lecture. Students that think US students would find a lecturer to be unusual/strange were more likely to think small group work would be common.
Reading/Text Use
We had a couple of items related to textbooks and reading, and the results were similar for those two items. We found that about while about 60% of the students do think they will be using textbooks overseas (and have more reading-based homework than in Japan), about 40% do not, and tend to think US professors in America avoid the use of texts rather than having them as part of the course. We were happy to find the majority here understands they will be doing a lot of reading (though we are not sure if they realize just how much it involves).
For this item, we found that students in our Center for International Education (our CIE is where students have courses just before going overseas, with international students and taught similarly to courses in our partner schools overseas) were more likely to know that US students have more reading than students in Japan – unfortunately we only had data from 64 students in that program, though. We also find that sophomores were more likely than first-year students to know they’d have more reading in the US.
Once again, we also found a correlation between students’ beliefs about lecture, too. There seems to be a correlation, at least in this sample of students, between assumptions about textbook use and lecture. Students that were more likely to think of lecture as common were more likely to also think of reading as important. Students that thought less of the importance of texts and reading were less likely to think of lecture as a common experience in US classes.
We also had a set of items on the survey related to willingness to communicate (WTC). We found that, at least in this sample, students with a higher WTC were more likely to think US professors make use of texts, while students with a lower WTC were more likely to think US professors avoid the use of texts.
Academic Writing vs. Kansobun
We were happy to find that most (72%) of our students seem to understand that university-level writing would be about data and theories rather than kansobun-type writing (which our survey item described as being more like a personal opinion/experience-type essay, in addition to using the Japanese term kansobun). While still concerned about the 28% that think kansobun-style writing is what they would be doing, we were happy to see the majority of students know the writing would not be like a kansobun, we did get some interesting results that also concerned us when we ran crosstabs for this item.
Our survey had a set of items that together indicated whether a student is oriented toward Japanese values and media, or instead is looking outside of Japan for values, and is seeking to “escape” this culture. We found that in this sample, and somewhat surprisingly, that students who prefer Japan and may be more domestically oriented were more likely to think of the writing done in US universities as about data and theories, while students more likely to be oriented toward overseas media, looking outside Japan for values, and seeking to escape this culture were more likely to think of the writing to be kansobun-type writing.
We also had a set of items that sought to identify which students would be oriented toward actually wanting to study abroad and actively preparing for it, vs. students that said they had less interest in study abroad and fewer plans to do it. We were concerned to find that the students with stronger plans to study abroad to be more likely to believe the writing would be like a kansobun. The students with fewer plans to go were more likely to have an accurate understanding of what the writing would be like.
This item also produced a couple of other interesting results. We found that students who thought US students would be unsurprised by a lecturer were also more likely to know the writing would be about data and theories rather than personal experience.
We also found students who said they would be more likely to raise their hand and ask a teacher to clarify something in class were also more likely to think of the writing as a kansobun. The students who were less likely to raise their hands and ask for help were more likely to think of the writing as being about data and theories.
Lecture
Despite the fact that our students do experience a lot of lecture in our partner schools overseas, this may not be the image our students have of what they will experience in a US classroom. It seems we have a good number of students that do not associate the technique of lecture with classes conducted in English-speaking countries. We had two items on the survey related to our students’ assumptions about lectures. On one of them (not one we are reporting on at JALT), we found that over half of our students think that lecture is uncommon in the US. One item we are reporting at JALT produced an almost even split between our students on whether they think US students would think a professor that teaches primarily using lectures is strange. We had hoped a larger number of students would realize that while the way lectures might be conducted is not necessarily the same as in Japan, it is still a widely-used teaching technique.
As mentioned above, we found a correlation between student beliefs on whether or not texts are commonly used in the US with how students responded to this item on surprise at a lecturer. Students that think texts will be an important part of their overseas experience were more likely to think US students would be unsurprised by a lecturer. This concerns us since 40% of our respondents did not think of texts/reading as common.
Office Hour Visits
We were happy to see that most (84.4%) respondents think US students visit their professors during office hours at least a few times each semester.
One interesting result from the crosstabs on this item was that students with strong opinions on the lecture item discussed above (surprise at a lecturer) had different opinions on the office hour visit issue. Respondents that think US students would be surprised by a lecturer were also more likely to think of office hour visits as common. Might this reflect a perception of a lecturing professor as inapproachable?
We also found that students who think informal debate is a common class activity were more likely to think of office hour visits as common.
In Closing
We decided to focus our attention in this poster on results that came back as statistically significant, and also where we had at least 30 respondents in each subgroup to compare. As mentioned in the introduction, more details are available in the introduction. This research is very exploratory in nature.
The thing that surprised me (Stephen) is that most of the items related to background or past experience did not produce statistically significant results. Even though we had a pretty even split of first-year vs. second-year students, and also intensive English students vs. regular English majors, these differences in program/year did not seem to consistently relate with the students’ preconceptions about study abroad. We also had questions to identify which students had prior study abroad experience before coming to university, as well as which students had taken the time to talk with people about what study abroad would be like. Interestingly, though, these items did not produce strong enough results to report here. As we continue our research with new surveys we might find these things are actually important, but in this dataset the students’ beliefs about what study abroad would be like seemed to mostly correlate with certain other preconceptions (text and lecture as connected), or in some cases differences in attitude (such as WTC).[/read]
