Publications

Over the past several years, the field of International Education has adopted a serious focus on articulating and documenting desirable outcomes of a study abroad experience. Many different approaches are exemplified in recent issues of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, where researchers use the full range of quantitative and qualitative tools at their disposal to assess student learning abroad in multiple areas: second language acquisition abroad, accounting for learning across several domains, non-traditional students and programs, the impact of program duration, assessing curricular interventions, and more.

Inspired by such studies, and by additional work presented by colleagues at both NAFSA and CIEE conferences, API first launched our series of research initiatives in 2005 with a two-pronged approach to investigating students’ goals for and beliefs about living and learning abroad. We began by looking at past program evaluations to determine the most important learning opportunities that API students mentioned time and again, and highlighted these in a publication called “Student Learning Abroad”, which was issued to commemorate the Year of Study Abroad in 2006 and reissued in an expanded version in 2007. At the same time, from 2005 to 2007, we carried out a two‐year research project focused on “Goals Setting in Study Abroad”. Throughout this study, we aimed to get a greater sense of what students hoped to achieve while abroad in order to provide them with the support they needed to succeed on their own terms. Following on the Goals project, API continued our research initiatives with our “Global Perspectives” project, using the newly created Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI) and complementary open-ended queries to gain a sense of our students’ perceptions of “global citizenship” and “global competence”.

All API research projects are designed with a consciousness-raising component. We believe the act of encouraging our students to consider a given set of questions contributes to increasing their awareness of the issues themselves, and opens a space for dialogue that may otherwise have remained unexplored. We also consistently use our research results to inform the design of new resources and programming that can support our students in a more targeted manner and help them become more proactive and deliberate learners. In all our work, API is committed to facilitating student learning through a multifaceted approach which takes into account the objectives and beliefs of our students as well as best practices in the field of International Education.