An Academic and Cultural Transition Course for International Students: Efficacy and SocioEmotional Outcomes

The current study details changes in first-year international undergraduate students’ perceived knowledge of, confidence in, and usefulness of intercultural skills in specific US university contexts after completing a semester-long academic and cultural transition course at a mid-sized private university. Results revealed significant increases in participants’ (n= 42) perceived intercultural competence, perspective shifting, suspending judgment, self-advocacy, and interacting in class with students of other cultures; participants also reported significantly higher campus belonging and social support than a comparison group of students at the university who were not enrolled in the course (n = 32). These findings provide initial evidence for the potential of transition courses to increase intercultural skills and campus belonging for first-year undergraduate international students attending US universities

Situation-based contingencies underlying wisdom-content manifestations: examining intellectual humility in daily life

Objectives: Existing assessments of intellectual humility (IH)—a key component of wisdom—do not examine its manifestation in daily life while sufficiently focusing on the core idea of the construct: owning up to one’s intellectual shortcomings. The present research sought to examine situational contingencies underlying daily manifestations of IH-relevant characteristics. The State-Trait IH scale developed here is novel in that it both offers greater content validity and coverage of IH and provides a robust measure for assessing IH in a contextualized manner in daily life. Methods: We developed a trait version of the State-Trait IH Scale in two studies and subsequently examined daily manifestations of IH-relevant characteristics utilizing a contextualized state version of the State-Trait IH Scale in a 21-day experience sampling study. Here we tested how specific situational contingencies (associated with the context and the personality of the individual with whom participants engaged) influenced the manifestation of IH-relevant qualities. Results: We found strong evidence for the validity of both versions of the scale. Specifically, the state measure exhibited high within-person variability, and aggregated state assessments were strongly correlated with the trait measure. Additionally, morality positively predicted manifestation of IH, while disagreeableness negatively predicted manifestation of IH. Discussion: These results offer new directions for research on the expression of wisdom-related characteristics in daily life