RESEARCH PAPER
Approaches to studying across culturally contrasting groups: Implications for security education
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War Studies University, Warsaw, Poland
Online publication date: 2017-09-24
Publication date: 2017-09-28
Security and Defence Quarterly 2017;16(3):3-19
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
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. The 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.
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