INTERNATIONAL STUDENT PERCEPTION OF COLLABORATIVE GROUP EXAMS IN A FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY COURSE

Abstract

Two-stage collaborative exams have previously been shown to improve students’ understanding and long-term retention of material, while helping to develop collaborative skills. Very little work has been done, however, on the impact of this practice on international students, who may be faced with particular challenges or contexts.. Building on previous work, the perception of first-year international students in an engineering chemistry course offered as part of the Vantage College Applied Science program at UBC regarding the practice of two-stage exams was assessed before and after participating in one for the first time. Although the experience was overall very positive, and the anticipated difficulties of the midterm seemed to be overestimated, several key challenges must be addressed before deciding whether to continue with this practice as part of this program, namely communication barriers preventing the effective participation of all group members, and a structural competitiveness that may discourage collaboration, both of which are inherent to the Vantage APSC program, as well as frustration associated with mixed technical proficiencies of group members, which is a more typical concern associated with this type of assessment.