How international students' cross-cultural adaptation impact educational gains: A case of Yenching Academy of Peking University

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Mapping international student experiences

Proposal

Introduction
With the development of globalization, the degree of internationalization of a university becomes an increasingly important criteria and the strategy of study-in-China receives more and more attention from Chinese government and universities. In 2017, China has become the third largest destination in the world after USA and UK. However, less than half overseas students pursue a degree, among which only 14% students are sought for master or doctor’s Degree. Thus, The education for international high-level degree-seeker is still a weak field in China, compared to those developed countries. Government and China’s top universities are exploring the way to improve high-level international education and attract more overseas students from all over the world. Yenching Academy of Peking University in China is a noteworthy exploration. Its peculiarity lies in the diversity of its international students, the high quality of international students, the teaching of English in its courses and the focus on China. These differences make the Yenching Academy’s international students a special group different from the ordinary international students in China’s universities, which remains to be undiscussed. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a survey specifically for the students of Yenching Academy, through which adds to the understanding of overseas graduate students in China, focusing on their cultural adaptation and educational gains.

Research questions
This research tends to answer questions as follow:
(1) Who becomes the students of Yenching Academy of Peking University and what’s their individual characteristics?
(2) What’s foreign students’ educational gains that they acquire from studying master degree in Yenching Academy of Peking University and what’s the difference among them?
(3) How they adapt culturally to the Yenching Academy and Peking University and how the cultural adaptation influences their educational gains in Yenching Academy?

Anticipated contributions
As far as the current research is concerned, most of the research on Yenching Academy is based on macroscopic research, and there is still a lack of research from the perspective of Yenching Academy students. Thus, the study can contribute to the theory and practice as follows: (1) theoretically providing an empirical research from the micro perspective of Yenching Academy students, being a supplement to the study of Yenching Academy and overseas students in China’s universities; (2) practically providing a reference for the quality improvement of Yenching Academy itself and China's future internationalization of higher education.

Methodology
This study applies mixed methods. (1) Quantitative method: Based on literature research, the research designs the questionnaire and distributes it to all the international students in Yenching Academy. The research will utilize descriptive analysis, factor analysis and structural equation model (SEM) as the research tools on SPSS. (2) Qualitative method: The research will conduct face-to-face, in-depth interviews of 8-10 students from Yenching Academy, while selecting interviewees, taking into account their gender, nationality, and cultural circle.

Preliminary findings
Now the questionnaire has sent to 97 students of class 2017, among which 52 have been collected and 48 are valid. From the current results, the study discovers that there is a significant positive correlation between the situation of students' pressure response and the gains of academic ability, value and communication ability, that is, stress adaptation has a positive and significant effect on educational gains. Based on the particularity and pluralism of Yenching Academy, the study attempts to put forward suggestions on language ability and stress coping to increase students educational gains.

This is only the initial research results. More questionnaire will be collected from the students of class 2018 and more interviews will be conducted to cross-check the results.

Author

• Yingchen Yang, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, Beijing, China