The academic and personal experiences of Mainland Chinese students enrolled in a Canadian Master of Education Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to communicate the positive and challenging aspects of a Master of Education program, as perceived by Chinese students at an Atlantic Canadian university. Design/methodology/approach Assuming a qualitative methodology, 21 Mainland Chinese students participated in individual, paired, and focus group semi-structured interviews. Interviews were member checked. Data were analyzed through content analysis. The findings are discussed using Deardorff’s (2006, 2009) concept of intercultural competence. Findings Students perceived the best features of their educational experience to be personable instructors, their enhanced English skills, and practical course-based experiences embedded in the program. The main challenges were social isolation, English language requirements and related assignments, and theoretical expectations of the program. Research limitations/implications This study contains a somewhat small qualitative small sample size (i.e. 21 participants), therein, disabling any generalization of results. In other words, the data findings are unique and non-generalizable beyond the particular research case. However, transferability, which refers to the extent in which the results of an original study can be applied to similar people, contexts, or settings (Lincoln and Guba, 1985), may be applied to the findings if the reader deems the context of this study in alignment with his/her situation. Practical implications Approximately, 82 percent of Canadian universities rate internationalization as a top priority, supporting the need for research in this area. An implication of the study is that internationalization of higher education must be more than just the recruitment of international students. Universities have direct and fiduciaries responsibilities to support the academic needs, personal needs of their international students, as well as the intercultural competence of all students, instructors and staff. Originality/value There is a plethora of research documenting experiences of international students, in general, but such research is not directly transferrable to the Chinese student. The issues and problems encountered by Chinese international students are unique and should be addressed independently from international students. Moreover, a lot of the research that focuses on Chinese students enrolled in North American universities, predominantly, is conducted within the USA, and such research tends to spotlight the challenges only. In turn, the authors’ research addresses a specialized focus of the international Chinese student in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".