The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), founded in 1826, is nationally known for its dedication to excellence in fine arts, design, and liberal arts. The current mission of MICA is to “empower students to forge creative, purposeful lives and careers in a diverse and changing world, thrive with Baltimore and make the world we imagine” (Maryland Institute College of Art, 2017). Currently at MICA, there are four full-time English language learning (ELL) faculty in the undergraduate level and one in the graduate level. Recently, the enrollment of international students has increased to compose 30% of both the overall undergraduate and graduate student population. This rise of international student representation on campus created an impetus to answer the question: “What impact does ELL support in academics and programming have on international student satisfaction and success?”

The goal of this preliminary study is to evaluate the impact of current language support programs on graduate student satisfaction with their coursework at MICA. We hypothesize that students who participate in ELL coursework will show overall positive perceptions, emotions, and attitudes in their feedback. Also, we hypothesize that students who participate in ELL coursework will have higher placement rates, merit awards, and completion rates for their degrees. We suspect that ELL support improves student satisfaction, but it may be that low language proficiency degrades satisfaction and curricular support is unable to compensate for that degradation. We expect the study to benefit the student participants and the MICA community through improvements to the curriculum resulting in greater satisfaction and success not only for English language learners but all members of the MICA community. Highlighting successful existing initiatives and shedding light on areas that may require additional language support will help to direct resources and focus attention on high-impact pedagogical interventions.

Description

Making a substantive test of our hypothesis will require a variety of methods deployed over the course of several years, possibly longer. We are beginning this process with lightweight tools that will help us to better understand our student population, the qualities of the data we have available, and the routes we can take to assessing student satisfaction and success. In our first phase, we are approaching data gathering in three ways: augmenting anonymous course evaluations for ELL coursework, a survey of open-ended questions about linguistic and cultural adjustment to student life at MICA, and a series of face-to-face interviews. For the purposes of this study, we define an international student as a student studying full time in the United States with an F-1 visa or its equivalent.

The standard course evaluations for ELL courses in the graduate school have been extended with five additional prompts designed to elicit responses (on a 5-point Likert scale) touching on students’ feeling of comfort and competence with the use of English language in their coursework. The respondents are asked to select whether they “strongly agree,” “agree,” are “undecided,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” with a given statement. The five statements are:

1. This course has improved my confidence.

2. My English language skills have improved during this semester.

3. This course has helped me improve in my other courses.

4. I feel comfortable in my classes at MICA.

5. I feel ready for next semester.

These augmented course evaluations were implemented at the close of the Fall 2017 semester. We are currently in the process of analyzing the results.

In addition to the augmented course evaluation, we created a survey of mostly open-ended questions intended to gauge students’ experience with language and cultural adjustment to student life at MICA. The questions that elicited free-form text responses were coded after data collection based on the range of responses we received. The questions included:

1. Do you want to work in the U.S. after graduation?

2. How will attending MICA contribute to achieving your professional goals?

3. What is your favorite class this semester? Why?

4. Do you want more support from MICA for learning and using English effectively?

• 4(a) If yes: What kind of language support do you think would be most useful for you?

• 4(b) If no: Why do you not want additional language support?

5. What was the most important challenge or problem you experienced this semester?

6. What has been your best experience so far at MICA?

Our preliminary analysis shows that the response rate was higher among students enrolled in ELL coursework, largely because professors set aside time during those classes to complete the survey. Running the survey uncovered an unanticipated problem with the question, “What kind of language support do you think would be most useful for you?” A large portion of the respondents named a language in their response, revealing a garden path ambiguity in the phrase “language support” that seemingly led to an interpretation of the question equivalent to “What language needs support?” Future iterations of the survey will use an alternate phrasing.

At the end of the upcoming Spring 2018 semester, we plan to conduct interviews with 12 randomly selected graduate students who are studying in the United States on an F-1 visa. Six of the participants will be recruited from students enrolled in ELL coursework and the other six will form a control group of students who have not received curricular English language support.

The planned interview questions overlap the survey questions and the course evaluation questions, which we hope will allow us to estimate how well our interviewees represent the broader range of F-1 visa holders at MICA. The planned interview questions include:

1. What do you think about your use of English in your coursework? How has it impacted your experience? Was language ever a barrier?

2. How do you feel about your MICA experience so far?

3. What are your hopes for the future? Finishing up at MICA and after MICA?

4. If you have taken an ELL course, how did the ELL course influence your study? Do you feel like it helped you or got in your way (taking up too much time, etc.)?

5. If you haven’t taken an ELL course, knowing what you know now, would you have elected to take ELL courses?

6. How has your confidence in your language ability changed while you were at MICA? How has that confidence changed your studio or professional work?

7. How do you feel you have adjusted to the MICA community?

The interviews, the content of which will be confidential, will be recorded and we will use grounded theory coding (Strauss, 1998) to make quantitative observations.

Conclusion

In the preliminary phase of this study of the impact of English language support courses on student satisfaction and success, we are exploring and validating several methods for data collection. For example, the pilot survey has already uncovered a problematic phrasing that we can adjust to improve the quality of responses. We expect to continue collecting informative responses and feedback from the students about their experiences and look forward to implementing more objective and quantitative measures in the future, such as diagnostics and assessments that can be correlated to students’ subjective survey responses.

References

Maryland Institute College of Art. (2017). MICA presents its new mission, vision and tenets. Retrieved from https://www.mica.edu/About_MICA/Mission_and_Vision.html

Strauss, C. A., (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Joseph Carr (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) is a filmmaker and multimedia designer working and teaching in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, specializing in teaching first-year undergraduate English language learners at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Sukyun Weaver (MA in applied linguistics, Teacher’s College, Columbia University) is a faculty member in the Graduate Liberal Arts at Maryland Institute College of Art serving as the English language learning specialist. Her research interests include culturally and linguistically responsive student support, intercultural training, and corpus-based linguistics.