Student achievement in mathematics continues to be compared internationally, with the results indicating that students in other developed countries are outperforming students from the United States. Mathematical modeling is an expectation in both the new Common Core State Standards and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study seeks to find the differences in expectations for students in mathematical modeling between the United States and Singapore, which is one country that regularly outperforms the U.S. on international assessments. Since teachers and students regularly use textbooks for curriculum, homework, and other resources, this study compares two textbooks from the U.S. with the high school series adopted in Singapore. More specifically, the aim of this study is to compare frameworks of mathematical modeling and code to-be-solved problems in algebra textbooks using characteristics common to all frameworks. While the U.S. textbooks explicitly state which word problems address the expectation of mathematical modeling, the Singapore program does not have this attribute. So, an equivalent chapter (in objective and number of to-be-solved problems) in all three textbooks will be coded for evidence of the expectations of mathematical modeling. The results of this study indicate that no standard framework for mathematical modeling exists, but there are multiple areas of overlap. This study found that the ratio of word problems to numerical problems was comparable in the three textbooks, although the U.S. algebra textbooks used in a one-year course had the same number of to-be-solved problems as the four-year Singapore series. Results also indicate that to-be-solved problems in the Singapore textbook series do not provide students with more explicit mathematical modeling instructions than do the U.S. textbooks. This study also found that the interpretation of to-be-solved problems differed according to the experience of the rater. None of the textbooks in this study provided to-be-solved problems that asked students to engage in the mathematical modeling cycle as delineated by any of the four frameworks.

Given the increasing number of Chinese international students attending American universities, an important study would be to consider problems arising during these students' initial transition period, as they acculturate into the American culture and educational system. Taking this information into account, university counseling centers, campus services, and those who interact with and support these students would be better able to assist in easing the initial and ongoing stress of living in a foreign country and adapting to a new way of life. Thirteen Chinese international students participated in qualitative interviews conducted in Mandarin Chinese, each participant's native language. Each participant was born and raised in mainland China, had never travelled to the US before studying abroad, had no direct family relative in the US, and had studied at a university in the US for more than two years. In order to gain a better understanding of Chinese international students' initial transition to live and study in the US, a qualitative research design was utilized. This study used a collaborative hermeneutic approach to obtain a valid and common understanding of the meaning of each transcribed interview. Data analysis followed the hermeneutic circle, which emphasizes that the meaning of the text can be better understood through reading individual parts and comparing meanings of parts and whole. These study used a team to analyze data, thus avoiding the narrow reliance on individual interpretations. Based on their personal perspectives, participants reported their experiences encountered during their initial transition into the US. More specifically, information shared during individual interviews with Chinese international students indicated specific experiences in regard to their initial and ongoing adjustment to the U.S. environment, including how they made sense of their experiences and how their ways of thinking and behaving changed as a result of being influenced by their experiences interfacing with U.S. culture. Participants also shared their strategies they perceived as helpful in specific situations. Based on an analysis of participants interviews, themes that arose from the interviews included (a) difficulties and challenges they faced as new immigrants; (b) differences they encountered in respect to their homeland and the new environment, including language/communication, culture, academic study and learning, living in the US, and psychological adjustments; (c) positive growth they acknowledged from facing challenges and adapting to their new environment; and (d) acknowledging the need to accept help and how to more proactively seek and receive help as needed. Implications for more actively assisting and including Chinese international students are discussed.

The significance of this dissertation research is twofold with both methodological advancement and empirical update. In this dissertation research, quantile regression (QR) was introduced to social sciences researchers as a response to the weaknesses of the traditional mean-based regression often referred to as multiple regression. General advantages of QR includes being more flexible for modeling data with heterogeneous conditional distributions, more robust to outliers, and having richer characterization and description of the data. Results of QR allow researchers to not only describe a general trend of changes in the effects of the independent variables across a continuous distribution of the dependent variable but also provide information on characteristics of any shift in the distribution caused by the independent variables. These shifts pertain to location, scale, and shape shifts. This dissertation research reviewed graphical ways to examine location, scale, and shape shifts, and more importantly, developed statistical ways to quantify location, scale, and shape shifts (i.e., test for statistical significance of location, scale, and shape shifts). Overall, this dissertation demonstrated that the introduction of QR as an advanced statistical procedure will advance the quantitative landscape of social sciences research. The results of this dissertation showed that QR can detect the differential effects of independent variables on the dependent variables that mean-based regression cannot detect and therefore uncovers more detailed relationships. This quality of QR enables more in-depth research than mean-based regression in many fields. The results of this dissertation also showed that QR allows for the understanding of relationships between variables outside the mean of the data, making it useful in understanding outcomes that are non-normally distributed and that have non-linear relationships with the independent variables. Finally, this dissertation introduced ways to detect and describe distributional shifts caused by the independent variables. The median regression line describes the (central) location shift. In addition to the estimated location shifts, the other QR lines provide information about the scale and shape shifts. This dissertation developed the bootstrapping approach to test for statistical significance when comparing location, scale, and shape shifts between parameters within and between samples (i.e., studies). This dissertation research applied QR to the examination of individual differences in mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy, using the 2003 and 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. The QR results showed that the effects of many student characteristics were not constant across the mathematics outcomes distributions (i.e., mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy). This suggested that individual differences were valued heterogeneously across the mathematics outcomes distributions. There was only one statistically significant location shift in terms of individual differences associated with family structure in both mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant scale shift in terms of individual differences associated with father SES in mathematics achievement for the middle 40 percent of the students between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant scale shift in terms of individual differences associated with gender in mathematics self-efficacy for the middle 40 percent of the students between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant shape shift in terms of individual differences associated with gender in mathematics self-efficacy between 2003 and 2012. Even though QR and LMR results can be similar in terms of statistical significance, they can differ dramatically in magnitude. Students’ age, gender, and socioeconomic status were typical examples in this study. The effect of student age generally became more positive as student mathematics achievement increased in 2003. This suggests that age had a stronger effect on better-performing students than lower-performing students in 2003. It also means that there are more age differences in the upper tail of student mathematics achievement distribution than in the lower tail.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the problem solving strategies, problem solving episodes, and metacognition of five Turkish students just graduated from elementary school and explore the interplay of these factors on their problem solving success in mathematics. The research data had been collected by clinical interviews and a self monitoring questionnaire followed by the interviews. Ten mathematical problems that participant students had worked on were selected among the released mathematical literacy items used in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003. The problem solving strategies used by participants were coded according to the descriptions given by Posamentier &amp / Krulik (1999). The cognitive-metacognitive problem solving framework developed by Artzt and Armour-Thomas (1992) has been used to observe the problem solving episodes of the participants. The coding system developed by Pappas et al. (2003) has been utilized to examine the major components of metacognition (mistake recognition, adaptability, awareness and expression of thought) of the participants. The self-monitoring questionnaire responses were analyzed to crosscheck the results obtained from the clinical interviews. The problem solving behaviors of the participants observed in the study confirmed their academic success levels. The study confirmed that the problem solving success is too complex to be clarified by a unique property or a behavior of the problem solver. The problem solving requires overcoming various obstacles to reach a successful result. Hence, not only the students should have the required mathematical knowledge and a good repertoire of different problem solving strategies, but also they should know when and how to use those strategies, and also they could monitor and regulate their problem solving processes using their metacognitive skills. So mathematics teachers should provide problems that require different problem solving strategies and encourage the students to explore new strategies, to take risks in trying and to discuss failures and successes with peers and teacher.

As a Chinese filmmaker, I feel obligated to reveal a true story about Chinese international students. Through my subjects and my stories, I am planning to express the messages that both adapting to a new culture and paying the financial cost of a foreign education have never been simple, but we will never give up our dreams.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the various reasons that have contributed to the decisionof international students not to return to their home countries after completing their studies, with a focus on students from Rwanda, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The study will include information about student’s home countries to provide a greater understanding of where they come from and how this has contributed to the decisions they have made. The push and pull factor theory will help to understand the different reasons why people choose to immigrate instead of staying in their home countries and what becomes a pull factor in the whole process. To gain even more insight into the students' choice not to return home, semistructured interviews with the 10 individuals will become important. By interviewing the 10 individuals from Rwanda, Nigeria, and Cameroon, one could tell that the countries have had amajor impact on the students' choice not to return home. Results showed that many chose not to return home because of the political instability that council in their home countries, some also felt living a life where they did not have to worry about tomorrow was an important factor in not going back home. The conclusion drawn was that countries were losing talented people because of their inability to put the needs of their citizens first.

Policy Evidence by Design: International Large-Scale Assessments and Grade Repetition Links between international large-scale assessment (ILSA) methodologies, international organization (IO) ideologies, and education policies are not well understood. Framed by statistical constructivism, this article describes two interrelated phenomena. First, OECD/ PISA and UNESCO/TERCE documents show how IOs’ doctrines about the value of education, based on either Human Capital Theory or Human Rights, shape the design of the ILSAs they support. Second, quantitative analyses for four Latin American countries show that differently designed ILSAs disagree on the effectiveness of a specific policy, namely, grade retention: PISA’s achievement gap between repeaters and nonrepeaters doubles TERCE’s. This matters and warrants further research: divergent empirical results could potentially incentivize different education policies, reinforce IOs’ initial policy biases, and provide perverse incentives for countries to modulate retention rates or join an ILSA on spurious motivations. In summary, ILSA designs, shaped by IOs’ educational doctrines, yield different data, potentially inspiring divergent global policy directives and national decisions. When ILSAs met policy: Evolving discourses on grade repetition. This study explores phenomena of ordinalization and scientization of policy discourse, focusing on the case of grade retention in publications by OECD’s PISA and UNESCO’s ERCE (2007-2017), from a sociology of quantification perspective. While prior research shows these ILSAs yield divergent data regarding grade retention’s effectiveness, this study shows similarities in their critical discourse on grade repetition’s effectiveness. Genre analysis finds similarities in how both ILSAs structure their discourse on grade repetition and use references solely to critique it, presenting a partial view of the scholarly landscape. However, horizontal comparisons also find differences across ILSAs in the use of ordinalization (e.g., rankings) in charts, as well as differences in the extent to which their policy discourse embraces scientization. The ILSAs converge in singling out grade repetition as the policy most strongly associated with low performance; this should be interpreted in the context of one key similarity in their design. Policymaking to the test? How ILSAs influence repetition rates Do international large-scale assessments influence education policy? How? Through scripts, lessons, or incentives? For some, they all produce similar outcomes. For others, different assessment data, shaped by different designs, and mediated by international organizations’ policy directives, prompt different policy decisions. For some, participation in these assessments may be linked to lower repetition rates, as per the policy scripts hypothesis inspired by world society theory (WST). For others, assessments’ comparison strategies (age vs. grade) influence repetition in participating countries, according to policy lessons or incentives hypotheses, respectively inspired by educational effectiveness research (EER) and the sociology of quantification, and particularly the notion of retroaction. Fixed-effects panel regression models of eighteen Latin American countries (1992-2017) show that participation in assessments is associated with changing repetition rates in primary and secondary, while controlling for other factors. The findings show statistically significant differences between some assessment types. The conclusions spur new questions, delineating a future agenda.

This thesis focuses on the transformation of identities of international master students attending Örebro University along with their perception of how this experience will affect their future. A qualitative content analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews was employed to explore the topic and answer the research questions. The thesis is guided by the theoretical background that stands on the synthesis of Jenkins’ perception of identity and the identity theory, supplemented by the understanding of international students as ‘student travellers’. The analysis of respondents’ narratives revealed that all aspects of their identity were affected. International students, throughout their stay abroad, live in a certain bubble as they distance themselves from the society on one hand and identify with the international students’ group on the other, affecting their social identity. However, before a new identity is formed and while the old one is being changed, the students experience a state of limbo during which uncertainty of roles emerges. Their person identity is influenced as well due to the international experience providing an opportunity to consciously alter some aspects of personality and, furthermore, to promote their independence, open-mindedness, and awareness of other cultures. Additionally, through contact with these other cultures, the international student develops into a person of two minds – international and of the country of their origin. In regards to the students’ perception of the future, the desire to stay international, to travel and live abroad is essential in creating something of a nomad life. Moreover, the respondents considered the international experience to have a positive impact on their career through an advantageous position over others along with the acquisition of an international network.

Study abroad has received much attention as an effective educational practice in today’s globalized world, and a wide range of skills, attitudes, and knowledge has been recognized as potential learning outcomes resulting from it. Accordingly, in the context of higher education, international students’ learning experiences have been understood in terms of measurable outcomes. Outcome-oriented understanding, however, has put international students’ learning experiences into a binary category of successful or failed learning experiences, based on whether they learned what they were supposed to learn during study abroad. This study takes a critical stance that binary understanding of student learning during study abroad fails to grasp the uniqueness and complexity of each international student’s learning experiences and aims to go beyond binaries to provide a more nuanced understanding of them. Through autobiographical narrative interviews, five students’ narratives about their learning experiences during study abroad were collected. The five students were graduate students studying in Sweden, which represent an under-researched group in the previous literature. Their narratives were comparatively analyzed using thematic narrative analysis, from the perspective of existential learning theory. The results demonstrated the uniqueness of the five international students’ learning experiences, by showing that they experienced existential learning with different dimensions of their existence and in different settings, including formal and informal settings. The results also highlighted the complexity of their learning processes, where each student sought to learn in a way in which the new values, beliefs, or knowledge that they encountered could be consistently integrated into their own biographies. This study shed new light on international students’ learning experiences, highlighting the uniqueness and complexity of them from the perspective of existential learning theory.

Thesis advisor: Hans de Wit / Thesis advisor: Gerardo L. Blanco / Today’s global knowledge economy has become complex, dynamic, and competitive. In this environment, the talented workforce is increasingly diverse, educated, and mobile. International talents tend to migrate to anglophone countries and contribute to technological innovation, scientific discoveries, and economic growth. The largest international student population in the top destination countries comes from Asia. At the same time, research has shown that Asian international students reported lower satisfaction and higher adjustment challenges due to linguistic and cultural barriers, negatively impacting their learning and living experiences. This dissertation aims to understand and explain the transnational transition process through a subset of the Asian international student population. Thirty-five current university student interviewees are purposefully selected. They are graduates of the “International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme,” a rigorous education pathway program popular in Asia for families to prepare their children for Western higher education. Asian International Baccalaureate (IB) alums, who received education in linguistically and culturally diverse settings, offered more nuanced and complex answers to what traditional literature has indicated about international student transitions and experiences. A Successful International University Transition Model is generated from the grounded theory analysis. This model illustrates the causal and intervening conditions that impact international transitions, with the central tasks of being a university student and becoming an adult. Further, the results are discussed with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus/practice to explain the heterogeneity in the process amongst the diverse international student population. Lastly, recommendations to stakeholders suggest ways to support globally mobile young adults in their transition and development journey. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.