Srhe conference 2014 poster

Srhe conference 2014 poster

1. 1. The key issues Chinese top up students experiencing in a UK university Xianghan (Christine) O’Dea (c.odea@yorksj.ac.uk) Business School, York St John university Introduction This poster presents a conceptual framework developed for my PhD study. The conceptual framework, which has drawn on Student Identity theories, has adopted a holistic approach. Its intention is to understand issues and problems Chinese top up students experience in transition to a UK university. Transition issues in the existing literature The research literature tends to examine Chinese students’ transition in a cross-cultural context and has positioned the adjustment as a negative, stress coping process. The difficulties and challenges identified in the literature can be summarized as language proficiency, academic challenge and social adjustment. The cross cultural adjustment models, however, do not provide a complete view of Chinese top up students’ transitional experience. For example, few of these models acknowledges the impact of individual differences (e.g., religion, family background) on transition. They also consider Chinese students as a single category and do not distinguish between traditional entry and non-traditional entries. Student identity development in university A popular alternative theoretical perspective is student identity development. The transition from school to university can be considered as the transition from one identity to another (Guisard et al, 2012). The current student development theories can be categorized into five types: personality development theories, social status & context theories, cognitive theories, social cognitive theories, and holistic theories. Methodology My PhD study is a case study of Chinese top up students studying in UK universities. It will use the Portrait Methodology (Bottery et al, 2009). Individually written “portraits” will be used to show the issues the participants encounter in transition and how each individual participant handles these issues. The sample size will be approximately 15 students, they will be interviewed both prior to and after they have commenced studies at the UK university. It is intended to take samples from students at a university in north of England. The conceptual framework The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth understanding of identity development of the individuals by exploring all factors that matter to this particular group of international students, but not to prejudge these students by simply re-testing the factors already identified in the literature. The theoretical framework takes the work on general student development and applies it to the transitional process. It has adopted the conceptual model of multiple dimensions of identity (Jones & McEwen, 2000) as a base structure and is composed with three key elements: personality development, cognitive development and contextual influences. In other words, exploring the Chinese top up students’ personality and cognitive development in the UK within the specific contextual influences. References • Bottery, M., Wong, P. M., Wright, N., & Ngai, G. (2009). Portrait methodology and educational leadership: putting the person first. International Studies in Educational Administration, 37(3), 82-96. • Guisard, Y., Behrendt, K., Mills, P., Telfser, S., Weatley, W., Hunter, C., Bone, Z. (2012). A course approach to student transition to university: A case study in agricultural business management. Creative Education, 3, 896- 902 My conceptual framework of Chinese top up students identity development