A Descriptive Survey Study of International Students’ Experiences at a Canadian University: Challenges, Supports and Suggested Improvements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every year a growing number of international students move abroad, predominantly to western countries, to pursue university education. They are motivated by various factors both in their home country as well in the prospective host countries and universities. Many of these reasons can be generally characterized in term of push-pull factors, impelling students to leave home and incentivizing them to pursue university education in other countries. However, upon arrival, international students may encounter a myriad of challenges over the course of their university studies. A substantial body of research has documented international student challenges but few studies have focused on their experiences in the Canadian context. The current descriptive survey study focuses on international students’ experiences – challenges, personal and institutional supports – during studies at a Canadian university, as well as their suggestions for what additional supports they think would be helpful. An online survey (n = 712) examined international students challenges within a number of domains: language, financial, academic, environmental and cultural, and personal-social. The majority of the international students reported financial, personal-social challenges. Covid-19 presented additional challenges for most international students. Student employment of various coping strategies (e.g. staying in touch with family) and institutional supports (e.g. international students centre) were also examined. Finally, summarizing the suggestions of student respondents a number of recommendations are made regarding how to improve supports for international students. Study limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".