Approaches to studying across culturally contrasting groups: Implications for security education

Abstract

<i>The problem of increased migration and integration of migrant children in schools has become a serious challenge for Security Education, especially the question of how to teach increasingly varied groups of students and whether students that come from culturally contrasting groups differ in their preferred learning style. This study sets out to analyse how students of various cultural backgrounds approach learning tasks, which is of utmost importance nowadays given that modern schools face the challenge of educating culturally diverse students. To this end, the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) was administered to 450 Thai students in a Thai university. Th e correlation between the learning approaches and individual differences (age, GPA and major) was assessed. Then, the results of the study were compared with the results of similar studies carried out in different cultures. The results show that the students scoring higher on the deep approach have the highest academic performance, whereas the students who approach the learning material strategically achieve the lowest learning outcomes. Furthermore, the Thai students did not differ significantly from their western peers (Norwegian, Egyptian, Portuguese and British); however, their results differed from the students from China, who generally scored lower on all subscales of the ASSIST scores. Thus, the findings of the study prove that the integration of migrant children can be highly successful because both migrant and host society students adopt similar approaches and strategies that strive for academic excellence.</i>