Student Global Competency Development: Appleby College Action Research
by Dawn Ronfeld & Lesley Buckmaster
During the 2021-2022 school year, we joined an Action Research Fellows program to Assess Student Global Competence offered by the Global Education Benchmark Group (GEBG). This multi session professional development program began with an overview of action research and was followed by sessions that focused on developing a research question, designing a research method, analyzing results, and reflecting on data gathered.
Our action research focuses on assessing the development of Global Competencies in students who are participating on our Global Experiential Trips.
We decided to focus our action research on assessing the development of Global Competencies in students who are participating on our Global Experiential Trips. The Global Ed team had previously experimented with assessing global competency development with students on global experiential programs in 2019 and 2020 that focused on all ten of our global competencies. This was a great opportunity to review and reflect on what we have done already as well as identify ways it could be improved.
Figure 1: Appleby College Global Competency Framework
Feedback provided in the Action Research Fellows program led to us narrowing our focus from the ten global competencies to a subset of three: Curiosity, Open-mindedness, and Adaptability. We chose these three competencies because students were introduced to these global competencies through their advisor or blue time curriculum and we felt each of these could easily be applied to any global experiential program. From here, we developed our research question "Do our student global experiential programs effectively support the development of the Global Competencies of curiosity, open-mindedness and adaptability?".
Our research question: "Do our student global experiential programs effectively support the development of the Global Competencies of curiosity, open-mindedness and adaptability?"
Our methodology included a self-assessment pre-trip, on-trip and post-trip as well as a trip leader assessment of each student during trip and post-trip. The global experiential program groups (all to domestic Canadian locations in the 2021-2022 school year) completed the pre-trip self-assessments during pre-departure meetings where they also took part in a review of each competency through discussion and activities. The on-trip self and leader assessments took place at a time that made sense in their itinerary according to the trip leader teams. The post-trip self and leader assessments took place in post-trip meetings. Assessment forms were handed in and the data was transferred into a spreadsheet where we could review and analyze the responses.
Unfortunately, not all programs were able to complete all sets of the assessments. This meant that we didn't end up with a full set of the information to review and analyze across all programs that took place last year. However, we were still able to glean some valuable information from the data we collected.
After implementing the initial assessments, we developed new ideas to better streamline the process for ourselves, participating students and leaders.
Almost immediately after we completed this last year, we had some new ideas to better streamline the process for ourselves as well as for the students and leaders. We have changed the pre and post-trip self-assessments to a Microsoft Form which will hopefully encourage more complete responses (i.e. providing examples) as well as an easier transfer of data for review and analysis. We hope that this will aid in more global experiential programs feeling this is an achievable assessment to complete and won't feel as onerous as the handwritten versions that were used last year. We also added two new questions to post-trip assessment to ask specifically if their global experiential program supported their development of the three global competencies as well as feedback on ways in which this could have been supported better.
We look forward to seeing what we will be able to learn this coming year from these assessments and also wonder if the international destinations of the global experiential programs this year will influence the responses given.
