THE CASE FOR ASSESSING EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES IN STUDY ABROAD

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, U.S. study abroad enrollments have increased by 160%, with nearly 130,000 students earning credit abroad during the 1998–1999 academic year. The growth has been especially striking during the past five reporting years, as the number of participants has swelled by an astonishing 70% (Davis, 2000, p. 16). During the past fifteen years or so, our discussions about study abroad have come more and more to be dominated by this sort of self-congratulatory number-crunching: we’ve come to regard each successive annual increase in participation as a worthy achievement in itself, and much of what we do, and much about what we report to each other, focuses on our challenges and successes in pursuing this goal at our individual institutions, and on the national level. Thus, we identify the obstacles that stand in the way of greater student participation; we report about our institutional successes in administratively overcoming those obstacles; we commit ourselves to increasing the participation of African-American, Hispanic, disabled, natural science, business, math, engineering, and other “non-traditional” students; and we relish the gains we make in encouraging more of our students to study in “non-traditional” destinations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

Citation

Vande Berg, M. (2003), "THE CASE FOR ASSESSING EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES IN STUDY ABROAD", Tomas M. Hult, G. and Lashbrooke, E.C. (Ed.) Study Abroad (Advances in International Marketing, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 23-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-7979(02)13003-1