Rethinking Methodologies: Implications for Research on International Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research in international student success, satisfaction, and challenges seems still to be constructed around the colonial, imperial paradigm. Informed by deficit models of language, culture, and literacy teaching, such research portrays international students’ challenges in terms of deficiency; discounts other languages, cultures, and literacy education; and reinstitutes the progressive and paternalistic role of the West, reifying its linguistic and cultural superiority. This essay interrupts the still dominant narrative that recreates the old binaries in two ways: (a) It frontloads the need to adopt strength-based approaches to counter dominant methodological paradigms from which much of knowledge about culturally and linguistically different/disadvantaged (CLDI) students is derived, and (b) based on my own ethnographic study on a South Asian immigrant population in Canada, it demonstrates that what the old paradigm views as deficits can and should be the very measures from which to appraise student success and satisfaction. Accordingly, the article’s main objectives are twofold: (a) expose the weaknesses of the deficit models of language, culture, and competence and (b) stress the need to reshape international student studies in higher education as a field of inquiry by foregrounding appreciative models and methodologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.214 | 0.230 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.084 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.041 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".