Survey Summary: Investigating International

Students’ Adaptive Skills in UC Davis

FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Ziwei Qin, Yuan Lao, and Yuantong Xiao

University of California, Davis

UWP 23-19

zwqin@ucdavis.edu
yualao@ucdavis.edu
xytxiao@ucdavis.edu
 Table of Contents
Background and Objective……………..……………..2
Survey Method……………..……………………………..3
Survey Results.……………..……………………...………4
Conclusions.…………..………………………….………..6
Appendices
A. Figures.……………..……..………………....………..7
B. Data and Questionnaires………….………..……..11

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 Background and Objective

The United States has historically been an ultimate destination

for international students to receive their highest quality of
education. Today, the United States remains the top choice country
for international students. The international student’s enrollment rate
increased drastically over these years and the impact of the
international students has been very important to the United States'
college culture. The college experience is very different for
international students compared to local students, especially for
freshman students. We hope this survey can help us investigate UC
Davis’ freshman international students’ adaptive skills and interaction
to their new college and community. Overall, this survey report is
prepared for giving suggestions and recommendations to
international freshman in our later blog.

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 Survey Method

We collected our data based on UC Davis' freshman

international students since our topic is about how international
students have an effect towards the university's culture. According
to the data, the percentage of males and females of our
respondents is 50% each. Our respondents’ majors include Biology,
Chemistry, Food Science, Sociology, Psychology, Math and
Economics. We focused only on UC Davis' international students
because most of our survey questions are specific about UC Davis'
campus and systems.
All our classmates in the class composed their own questions
and we chose out the best ones during class. We put all the
questions that are chosen on Google Drive and we created a link for
the respondents to have access on. We sent the link through
WeChat and text messages to our respondents; at last we received
22 true responds and based on these data we completed our
survey.

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 Survey Results

In this survey, our respondents are all freshman Chinese

international students from UC Davis, and they responded their true
answers to our questions which is very interesting for us to talk about.
About 55% of the students indicated they feel like they belong to the
university which suggests that about half of the students are not
adaptive enough to UC Davis (Figure 1). This is probably because all
our respondents are freshman and most of them just came to
America for education; it is like Rebekah Nathan’s description about
international student’s feelings towards the university in “As others
see us” that they are hard to adapt and involve in campus life due
to cultural and background difference. Since our survey also asked
about if they liked to work in groups or not, we had a very interesting
observation. Because America's college culture, the school
advocates students to work together for efficiency, however, our
results showed that only 36% of them prefer to work in groups (Figure
2). This data indicated that most of our respondents still likes to work
individually which is somehow a little different from the American
culture.
Another set of data stood out to us is about their friends from
other nationalities. The data showed that about half of their friends
are from other nationalities; this suggested that international students
are adapting to the college community and they are willing to make
friends that are not from their home country. Moreover, regarding to
the question about office hours, our result showed about 59% of
them only went to office hours 1 or 2 times (Figure 3). This is strongly
related to the international student's adaptive skills because in
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China, there are no office hours and Chinese international students
are not really used to this kind of teaching system; however, there
are still 32% of the students went to office hours for about 5 times,
which was impressive (Figure 3). Although some of the data showed
that they still need time to get used to America's education system;
however, the results that we received indicated that international
students are willing to join the community and learn how to adapt
America's college culture.

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 Survey Conclusion

According to the data and results we collected, it seems the

survey conveys an unexpected result that only half of the sample
body has the feeling of belonging to UC Davis. Even though UC
Davis are these freshman’s final choices of their college, the data
suggests a large group of international Chinese students perceive a
loss of adaptation to the environment. A situation where they intend
to avoid interacting to the new people and environment occurred.
This phenomenon suggests that it is probably easy for international
freshman to feel loss and ambiguity in recognizing belongingness in
new environment since they are in a different educational system
and campus life. However, the data also suggests that students who
incorporate in more socialization and interaction to the campus or
courses claim their stronger belonging to UC Davis. This indicates that
more interactions the international students have probably will result
in better adaptation in UC Davis campus. So maybe encouraging
freshman participating in more socialization and academic
communication could increase international students’ involvements
and connections to UC Davis.

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 Appendices

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Figures:

Do You Feel That You Belong to University?

maybe
18%

yes
no 55%
27%

yes no maybe

*Figure 1: shows students’ responses about how many students have belongings to
schools.

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 Do You Like Group Works in Class?

Yes
36%

Sometimes
50%

No
14%
Yes No Sometimes

*Figure 2: shows students’ responses about whether they like or dislike the on-
class group works.

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 How Many Times Have You Been in Teachers' Office
Hours
14

12

10

8
Times

0
I have never been
more than 5 times 3-4 times 1-2 times in any teachers'
office hours
Series1 7 2 13 0
Frequency

*Figure 3: shows students’ responses about how many times they have been in
teachers’ office hours.

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 Questionnaires

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UWP 23-19 Survey Report:
Topic-Campus Culture

Please answer the questions below, your identity will remain anonymous. Thank you.

UWP 23-19 Survey Report:

*required

Questions:
1. Age*
 17-20
 20-23
 23-26
 26+

2. Gender*
 Female
 Male
 Prefer not to say

3. Ethnicity*
 White
 Hispanic
 Asian/Pacific Islander
 Black/African American
 Native American or American Indian
 Other

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4. Major (open question) *
5. What year are you in school? *
 Freshman
 Sophomore
 Junior
 Senior
 Senior+

6. Are you an international student? *

 Yes
 No

7. How much time do you spend on social media everyday?

 2 hours
 4 hours
 6 hours
 More than 6 hours
 I don’t use any social media

8. Are you member of any clubs or recreation centers?

 Yes
 No

9. How often do you have lunch with your friends?

 1-3 times per week
 4-6 times per week
 6-10 times per week
 I don’t have time to have lunch with my friends
 I don’t have friends to have lunch with

10. Do you have any friends from other nationality?

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  Yes
 No

11. What transportation do you use at Davis?

 Bicycle
 Car
 Bus
 I mostly walk

12. How many times per week do you go to ARC (Activity and
Recreation Center)?
 1-3 times
 3-5 times
 More than 6 times per week
 I don’t go to ARC because I don’t have time
 I don’t go to ARC because I don’t like to exercise

13. How much time do you spend on doing your homework per day?
 1-3 hours
 3-6 hours
 6-8 hours
 More than 8 hours

14. How many times have you been in your teachers’ office hours?
 More than 5 times
 3-4 times
 1-2 times
 I have never been in any teachers’ office hours

15. How often do you go to writing studio or any tutoring sessions?

 1-3 times per quarter
 3-6 times per quarter
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  I don’t go to any tutoring sessions or writing studio

16. Are you satisfied with your academic environment?

 Yes
 No
 Maybe

17. Whom do you like to ask for help?

 Professor
 TA
 Classmates
 Nobody

18. How many units do you usually take?

 10-15 units
 15-20 units
 More than 20 units

19. What time do you usually go to bed?

 8-10 p.m.
 10-12 p.m.
 At 12-2 p.m.
 I stay up until morning

20. Do you like big lecture classes or small lecture classes? (Open
question)

21. Do you like group works in class?

 Yes
 No
 Sometimes
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22. Do you prefer a pass/fail grading system or letter grading
system? Why? (Open question)

23. Do you feel that you belong to university?

 Yes
 No
 Maybe

24. Can you explain your answer to previous question? (open

question)

25. How do you like UC Davis Campus? (open question)

26. Why did you pick UC Davis as your university? (open question)

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