This study examines adolescent students at an American international school and observes student use of social networking programs as well as physical actions in the search process. The study specifically observed multitasking behavior and organizational skills among students, as well as linkages made through social networking sites. Student observations, student interviews, analysis of Facebook entries, and a survey on multitasking yielded rich data. Students appear to be far more organized than previously suggested in the literature, and in this study, the organization proved to be largely self-taught. Students used their social networks to build a kind of group expertise that compensated for their youthful naivety. Students exhibited self-control within the search to the degree that they could focus on what they wanted to find, and they used heuristics—mental shortcuts—to achieve what they needed. Searches also suggest creativity in that students were flexible in their search methods and used a number of tools to gather information. Students could balance the needs of the academic or imposed search with their own online lives, meaning that they made compensations for social media and media multitasking when it was deemed necessary.

The social integration of international students has always been a much-discussed topic. As more and more students around the world choose to study or exchange abroad, help for the social integration of these international students is being improved. Schools, local and international students and other local student organisations as stakeholders all play different roles in this social integration issue. For schools, more international students help them to gain access to international resources and improve academic standards, thereby improving their international ranking and gaining access to more resources. It can also help local students to gain a broader perspective and improve the quality of local students. As a result, a growing number of initiatives and services are being implemented by schools and student organisations to help international students integrate into their new environment and society, such as buddy programmes, student orientation, new student guidelines and so on. However, not all of these measures and services are well implemented in all schools. This paper examines the different measures and services used to help new international students at Linnaeus University and the effectiveness of these measures for international students and finds that they are not effective in helping to address the problems and social integration of new international students. The designer, therefore, used design methods to analyse and redesign the current measures and services at Linnaeus University by pointing out the problems with the admissions guidelines and buddy program - provided by Linnaeus University and organised by the Student Union. The innovation of the solution is bringing together Linnaeus University and the Students' Union efforts on the social integration of international students. The resources of both parties are integrated to provide better assistance for the social integration of international students.

The major function of education is to prepare youth to be successful. Each country has its own unique educational system, and individuals leaving their own country to study expect to acquire a quality education in another country. United States’ college programs, including exchange student programs, attract students from aboard who want to pursue their bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree. However, these students come from countries around the world where the use of the English language might be limited. Providing effective language programs to support international students whose native language is not English has become an important concern in the international educational exchange process. This study adds to the understanding of the ESL students’ perceptions of ESL programs offered by the universities in the United States. More specifically, the overall objective of this study was to analyze ESL students’ learning experiences and their perceptions of ESL program at Mississippi State University. The results of this study suggest that (a) female students were more satisfied with the ESL program than male students, (b) age was not significantly and meaningfully associated with participants’ perceptions of the ESL program, (c) there was a moderate association between the ESL students’ perceptions of the ESL program and their experiences in using English as a second language, and (d) female students were more satisfied in using technology for learning English as a second language than male students.

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The COVID-19 global pandemic caused the cancellation of all sports and disrupted the lives, workout regimens, academic assistance, team social support systems, athletic identity, and mental health of athletes. International student-athletes (ISAs) were a particular population affected and understudied. This study explored the psychological distress level experienced by ISAs during the early stage of the pandemic and examined the effects of self-compassion, resilience, and social support on their distress. Data were collected in April and May 2020 from a larger parent study which included 514 ISAs from all three NCAA Divisions, 74 countries, and 22 different sports. Results suggested ISAs were experiencing similar levels of distress as domestic student-athletes, non-athletes, and other international populations but there was a significant gender difference where ISA women reported significantly higher psychological distress than ISA men. Findings also indicated that self-compassion, resilience, and social support negatively predict psychological distress of ISAs. Although resilience and social support did not moderate the relation between self-compassion and psychological distress when examined separately, a significant interaction effect between resilience and self-compassion on psychological distress (p = .0497) was found when exploring the double moderator model. Specifically, ISAs high in resilience and low in self-compassion were the most distressed. Counseling and preventive interventions to enhance self-compassion, resilience, and social support of ISAs are discussed. Limitations, DEI implications, and future research directions of this study are outlined.

The purpose of this qualitative, case study research project is to explore international student-athletes’ experiences at U.S. higher education institutions, probing how well nonimmigrant visa holders are prepared for postgraduate success through their college experiences. Six collaborators engaged in photo elicitation interviews to provide insight into how they have navigated their international student identity and student-athlete identity. Collaborators each shared 10-15 media files representative of their experiences, and then they engaged in 90-minute interviews to talk about what their selections meant to them and why they were significant. The frameworks of agency, self-authorship, and voice were used to gauge how the international student-athlete experience fostered collaborators’ journeys from external influence to internal meaning-making and equipped them to become leaders in their global societies. This project offers considerations and strategies for college athletics staff and international services staff to better support the international student-athletes on their campuses.

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The number of countries participating in large-scale international assessments has grown dramatically during the past two decades and the use of assessment results in national-level education policy debate has increased commensurately. Recent literature on the role of international assessments in education politics suggests that rankings and performance indicators can shape national educational discourse in important ways. This dissertation examines the use of one such assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in education discourse in the United States from 2000 to 2012. The United States played a key role in the development of PISA and has participated in almost every international assessment of the past fifty years. Yet scholars have mostly overlooked the reception of international assessment in the United States. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. Using an original dataset of one hundred and thirty texts from American academic literature, think tanks and the media, I examine the use of references to PISA and to top scoring countries on PISA, e.g., Finland and China (Shanghai), during the first decade of PISA testing. I find that PISA has rapidly become an accepted comparative measure of educational excellence throughout US discourse. However, despite consistently middling American scores, attempts to turn America’s PISA performance into a crisis of the US education system have not stuck. Instead, I suggest that both global and domestic politics play a stronger role in shaping the interpretations of student achievement on PISA than does student performance. I show how the American PISA discourse: (1) is driven by political, not empirical, realities; (2) contains few calls for policy borrowing from top-scoring countries and has not engendered any direct efforts at policy reform; (3) is framed with remarkable consistency across the political spectrum; and (4) is a profoundly elite enterprise, privileging the voices of international organizations and policy makers over those of parents, teachers and students.

Typescript (photocopy).