At the Margins of Internationalization: An Analysis of Journal Articles on College Student Development, Learning, and Experiences, 1998–2011

Abstract

Although international attention to understanding college student development, learning, and experiences has increased, leading higher education journals do not seem to have kept pace. We examined 8 higher education and student affairs journals (5 from the US, 3 from Europe) from 1998 to 2011. We found overall that 5% of articles addressed internationally focused topics related to student development, learning, and experiences. The most common topics were student learning, outcomes, and adjustment. We make recommendations for researchers, journal editors, and educators to improve the literature that can be used internationally to guide higher education policy and practice in the area of college students.

Stress and coping among university students in Sierra Leone: Implications for social work practice to promote development through higher education

“…The 2009 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Conference on Higher Education reinforced the message that ‘the University can no longer be seen uniquely as an institution for personal development – in today’s globalized era, personal intellectual advancement must go hand in hand with broader goals of sustainable development, poverty reduction, peace, and human rights’ (as cited in Renn et al, 2014: 278). Social workers have the opportunity to take a holistic, systems approach to developing an ecosystem that truly promotes and nurtures the higher education of vulnerable students in developing countries.…”

Publication trends in top-tier journals in higher education

“…We based our analysis on an substantiated set of protocols for examining trends in higher education (Renn et al , 2014; Tight, 2007; Townsend, 1993), which establishes precedence for gathering, categorizing, and analyzing data in journals and conference proceedings to investigate systematic trends with the hope of providing important contextual data and implications for practice and future research. Using these studies as a guide, we employed an analytic design and took several steps to categorize the data accurately and ensure reliability.…”

Students’ trajectories through higher education: a review of quantitative research

“…In sum, embedding students' trajectories in a wider context of the structures of the HE system would improve our understanding of long-term student behaviour in light of the opportunities and constraints that the HE system of a specific country context provides. The field of HE research may certainly benefit-both conceptually and empirically-from a stronger focus on comparative research (Renn et al 2014). As increasing numbers of countries are conducting large-scale (panel) studies on students, there is also growing potential for comparative research on students' experiences and trajectories in HE.…”

“…These figures are in line with the finding of Tight (2018) that most studies on students' experiences in HE come from the USA, where the field is more established than elsewhere. As the HE system in the USA was the first to experience expansion and massification, there was an early interest in, and need for, research on students' experiences, thereby leading to a long tradition of study in the field and expertise in exploiting large-scale panel data on students (Renn et al 2014). In contrast, the lack of studies from Asia mirrors the general state of Asian HE research in the international context (Horta 2018).…”