Over the past decades, a growing body of scholarship has sought to assess the extent to which education abroad programs deliver on intended outcomes for students. Scholars and practitioners share a common interest in moving beyond the assumption that education abroad is automatically and necessarily a transformational process, to find evidence of the ways that students may (or may not) develop as part of their time abroad (Gozik, 2014). While much has been examined regarding the success of programs in maximizing student learning (see e.g. chapter 3, this volume), this chapter explores an area in the research literature that has received far less attention, namely the role that individual program components have in contributing to student learning.
Reviewing the existing literature, this chapter explores five areas of programming often associated with education abroad: modes of instruction, housing, extra- and co-curricular activities, experiential learning, and support services. These align with the categorization of “meeting grounds” for intercultural learning, as developed by Ogden, Streitwieser, and Crawford (2014). “Academic programming” has been further split out into “modes of instruction” and “extra and co-curricular learning”, given the great expansion of both areas.
Instead of viewing a particular element or a combination of practices as the “gold standard”, it is argued that scholars and practitioners need to be aware of how all individual program components impact students (Strange & Gibson, 2017; Tarrant, Ruben & Stoner, 2014). A critical stance is essential to ensure the combination of components of any education abroad program is understood for their value in facilitating students’ achievement of desired outcomes
