Exploring Chinese students' Core Beliefs, Challenges and Strategies for Academic Adaptation in a Sino-Foreign University

17,750

The purpose of this project is to understand the challenges and educational beliefs of Year 1 students entering XJTLU, and mitigate them with data analysis and research-backed curriculum that is adapted to the needs of year 1 students in EAP and LAN010. Oftentimes the educational methods and academic structure of XJTLU is unfamiliar to students, especially for those who have only had Chinese schooling without exposure to foreign teaching and learning culture. The effort to cope with these differences has been shown in multiple research studies to hinder students’ academic success (Zhou et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2022). Data collected on students’ educational beliefs, experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms will provide the researchers with a clear idea of what specific interventions are needed to support Year 1 students. Integration of that data into Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell’s curriculum “Applied Brainology” will guide instruction to build students’ growth mindset, which will be essential in aiding students’ academic transition. This type of intervention involves the ideas of implicit intelligence (Blackwell et al., 2007) and a growth mindset (Dweck, 2000) to provide students with the tools to respond to and manage any “culture shock” in their new academic settings.