Promoting Global Competence Among High School Students

[摘要] Applying a mixed methods approach, the researcher explores how students in a suburban, Western Pennsylvania-area high school develop global competence through an Introduction to Global Studies (IGS) course. The study site is a home to 1763 students located in an affluent and predominantly white suburb with a strongly motivated teaching staff, high levels of student performance, with an engaged community and families’ participation. This site was chosen because it afforded the best of only two available local opportunities to study an existing global studies curriculum. The two areas of inquiry included the level of incoming students’ knowledge and skills as related to global competence and how the design and implementation of the IGS course impacted students’ global competence aptitude and critical thinking skills. Incoming students’ global competence aptitude was measured by administering the Global Competence Aptitude Assessment (Hunter, 2006) to 20 students and compiling results according to different scales. The impact of the IGS course on these students’ further development was examined through in class observations later analyzed employing Paul and Elder’s (2007) Critical Thinking Competency Standards. The results point to how teacher strategies, including specific emphasis on teaching critical thinking and critical analysis of information, contribute significantly to increasing students' global competence. They also demonstrated the rather low level of incoming students’ global competence aptitude and the role of a highly motivated and globally aware teacher on the classroom setting and outcomes. Future research on this topic should take advantage of longer time horizons to administer more effective pre and post assessment, address the potential implications of variation in teachers’ competence on course quality, and explore how variation in the resources, culture, socio-economic environment and other factors across school districts could impact outcomes.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh