International students in American universities face challenges associated with differences in culture, language and expectations. How do our international students perform in the first-year engineering classes? What is the influence of language and nationality on their performance? How do domestic and international students develop team working skills in this multicultural environment? In order to answer these questions, we studied the influence of language and nationality on the academic performance and team-member effectiveness of students in the Ideas to Innovation (i2i) classes. Our results provide a starting point for designing strategies to improve the experience of undergraduate students – domestic and international- in multicultural educational environments, such as that of the College of Engineering at Purdue.  

Biography:

Dr. Isabel Jimenez-Useche is a Post-doctoral research assistant at the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests are to understand the challenges that international students experience in American Universities and to develop strategies to better serve domestic and international students in multicultural learning environments (the global university).