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Students’ attitudes towards culturallymixed groups on internationalcampuses: impact of participation indiverse and non‐diverse groupsMark Summers a & Simone Volet aa School of Education, Murdoch University, Western AustraliaPublished online: 29 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Mark Summers & Simone Volet (2008) Students’ attitudes towards culturallymixed groups on international campuses: impact of participation in diverse and non‐diverse groups,Studies in Higher Education, 33:4, 357-370, DOI: 10.1080/03075070802211430

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Studies in Higher EducationVol. 33, No. 4, August 2008, 357–370

ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online© 2008 Society for Research into Higher EducationDOI: 10.1080/03075070802211430http://www.informaworld.com

Students’ attitudes towards culturally mixed groups on international campuses: impact of participation in diverse and non-diverse groups

Mark Summers and Simone Volet*

School of Education, Murdoch University, Western AustraliaTaylor and FrancisCSHE_A_321310.sgm10.1080/03075070802211430Studies in Higher Education0307-5079 (print)/1470-174X (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis3340000002008SimoneVoletS.Volet@murdoch.edu.au

International campuses provide social forums to enhance students’ interculturalcompetence, skills and confidence. Yet, despite multiple opportunities for social contact,the most typical pattern is one of minimal interaction between students from differentcultural backgrounds. This study examined students’ attitudes towards culturally mixedgroup work in the natural setting of an actual group project. More specifically, itinvestigated the attitudes towards culturally mixed group work held by students indifferent years of undergraduate study, the relationship of attitudes to experience withmultiple languages (as multiple cultures), whether attitudes are related to observedbehaviour, and how attitudes change over the course of participation in a diverse or non-diverse group. The study involved matched questionnaire data from 233 studentsenrolled in a first, second or third year business unit that included a semester-long groupproject. The study provides support for the value of promoting culturally mixed groupassignments.

Introduction

Higher proportions of international students at university have stirred considerable interestin the educational and social goals that may be achieved through the internationalisationof higher education (Knight 1994; Knight and de Wit 1995; Laws 2006). These include:promoting a critical awareness of the culture-specific, subjective nature of knowledge(Volet 2004); countering outgroup prejudice (Nesdale and Todd 2000); and fosteringstudents’ development of intercultural competence (Steir 2003). In order to preparestudents for work environments in which international trading and culturally diverse teamsare becoming increasingly prevalent (Ledwith and Seymour 2001), and to foster morepositive human relations in a socially interconnected world (Asmar 2005; Knight 1994),equipping students to function effectively in different cultural contexts is of critical impor-tance. There is thus a great need for inquiry into the structures and processes that universi-ties can put in place to facilitate the achievement of the educational and social goals ofinternationalisation.

Contact between local and international students is regularly noted as an important factorin achieving the aforementioned aims of internationalisation. However, there is muchevidence (e.g. Halualani et al. 2004; Ward 2001) to suggest that, despite the increasinglymulticultural nature of university campuses, the most typical pattern is one of minimal inter-action between students of different cultures. This phenomenon has been observed in all majorcountries hosting large numbers of international students, including the UK (e.g. Pritchardand Skinner 2002), the United States (e.g. Trice 2004), Australia (e.g. Smart, Volet, and Ang

*Corresponding author. Email: s.volet@murdoch.edu.au

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2000), New Zealand (e.g. Ward 2001) and Japan (e.g. Tanaka et al. 1997), and researchershave begun to focus on how universities can promote beneficial social contact between localand international students.

For example, Quintrell and Westwood (1994) demonstrated the associated benefits of apeer-pairing programme, in which first year international students were paired with localstudents who had received brief intercultural communication training, information aboutcampus students, and instructions to maintain bi-monthly contact with their internationalstudent partner. International student participants were more likely than non-participants toreport positive experiences of their first year at university, in addition to English-languagefluency gains. Todd and Nesdale (1997) implemented changes to the orientation programme,recreational activities and tutorial system of an Australian residential college, designed toincrease intercultural contact (both within and outside of the college), knowledge and accep-tance. Generally, the intervention appeared to be effective for local students, but not forinternational students, who did not differ from international student controls on any of theoutcome measures. Pritchard and Skinner’s (2002) intervention, in which international-localstudent partnerships were formed, and instructed to carry out various day-to-day life activ-ities together (e.g. watching TV or a movie at home, shopping for ingredients for a mealto be cooked and eaten together), increased international students’ enjoyment of, andconfidence with, cross-cultural interaction.

Another site of potentially fruitful intercultural contact that has received some attentionis that of assessed learning tasks carried out in culturally mixed groups. Promoting intercul-tural mixing in group assignment contexts appears particularly important, given the afore-mentioned pervasiveness of culturally diverse task groups in the workplace. Moreover,group work presents an opportunity for inter-group contact which satisfies Allport’s(1954) conditions for promoting more positive outgroup attitudes: endorsement by theuniversity authorities, both groups’ perception of equal status in the work group context,and in particular, co-operation towards a common goal. Student support for group assign-ment work as a medium for intercultural contact was noted by international student inter-view participants, who reported that doing assignments in culturally mixed groups fostersinteraction between local and international students (Smart, Volet, and Ang 2000). Someparticipants suggested intervention to ensure that group assignments were done in culturallymixed groups.

To date, research on culturally mixed group work has predominantly focused on inter-actional patterns (e.g. Hobman, Bordia, and Gallois 2004; Wright and Lander 2003) and taskperformance (e.g. Watson, Johnson, and Merritt 1998) in culturally mixed groups. A numberof studies have found that multicultural work groups often display superior task performanceto more homogenous groups, which bodes well for an increasingly multicultural workforce,and provides further support for the value of equipping university students with the skills towork effectively in culturally diverse groups. For example, in the context of tutor-assigned,culturally mixed group work in a university setting, De Vita (2002) reported that assign-ments done in culturally mixed groups attained higher marks, on average, than the usualindividual performances of both their local and international members. Watson, Kumar, andMichaelsen’s (1993) analysis of the performance of culturally mixed versus non-mixedwork groups, found that in the short term the culturally mixed groups performed less well,but in the long term they outperformed the non-mixed groups in ‘generating alternatives’and approaching problems in multiple ways, while otherwise demonstrating comparableperformance. By implication, if student participation in culturally mixed group assignmentsis to be an effective means of enhancing students’ intercultural competence and promotingmore favourable views about mixed group work, group projects should be long enough to

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allow culturally mixed groups to surmount initial difficulties and reap the longer termadvantages of cultural diversity.

These results have been mobilised (e.g. by De Vita 2002) to show that the beliefs under-lying some students’ avoidance of mixed group work – that completing assignmentsin culturally diverse groups will adversely affect their performance – are not borne out bythe data. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that cultural diversity is often linked toenhanced group performance. This in turn lends support to the idea that taking measures toensure student participation in culturally mixed work groups would be likely to promotemore positive student attitudes towards multicultural group work, and result in an increasedlikelihood of students choosing to work in multicultural teams in the future, as it wouldallow them to experience firsthand the benefits of doing so. However, we know of nosystematic examinations of how students’ attitudes towards mixed group work change as aresult of a mixed group work experience, or of the other personal or contextual variablesthat might bear upon students’ attitudes towards mixed group work.

Thus, while sub-optimal levels of intercultural mixing in assessed group work contextshave been well-documented, little is known about:

(1) How students’ attitudes towards multicultural group work change over the course oftheir undergraduate studies.

(2) The relationship between students’ prior multicultural experience and their attitudestowards multicultural group work.

(3) The extent to which students’ expressed attitudes towards multicultural group workdetermine whether they self-select into a mixed or not-mixed group.

(4) How their attitudes change over the course of their participation in a specific groupproject, and particularly whether their participation in a mixed or non-mixed grouphas a bearing on the changes that are observed.

These issues are critical to our understanding of whether the educational, social andcultural goals of internationalisation are being met, and comprise the central empiricalconcerns of our study. The study examines university students’ attitudes towards culturallymixed groups in the natural setting of an actual group project, and the impact of participationin diverse and non-diverse groups.

Our first research question is whether, and in what way, students’ attitudes towardsworking in culturally mixed groups change over their years of undergraduate study. It isimportant that more is known about whether undertaking a university degree increases one’spropensity to engage in culturally diverse work collaborations, for this is a major goal ofinternationalisation. Given the culturally diverse nature of the population of students fromwhich the participants were drawn, each extra year of university study provides studentswith additional opportunities for intercultural contact that satisfies Allport’s (1954) criticalconditions for reducing outgroup prejudice. From this perspective, it would be reasonableto expect that students in later years of study would report more positive attitudes towardsworking in culturally mixed groups than students in earlier years of study.

The second question is whether, and in what way, students’ past experience with differ-ent cultures bears upon their attitudes towards working in culturally mixed groups. Evidencefor a possible influence of multicultural experience on attitudes towards mixed group workis provided by Volet (1999), who found that Australian students who were born in countriesother than Australia reported more positive attitudes towards completing assignments inmixed groups of local and international students, than did students who were citizens oftheir country of birth. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that multicultural

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(in this case, cross-national) life experience leads to more positive attitudes towards cultur-ally mixed group work. For our study, since language is grounded in culture, and a relation-ship is expected between experience with multiple languages and extent of experience withother cultures, two language variables will be focused on as indicators of prior interculturalexperience:

(1) Monolingual (i.e. English-only speaking) versus multilingual.(2) Language of schooling (English or other).

As experience with other languages is expected to lead to higher levels of confidence incross-cultural encounters, it would be reasonable to expect that multilingual students willdisplay more positive attitudes than monolingual students, and that students who studied ina non-English speaking school prior to university will report more positive attitudes thanthose who went to English-speaking schools. Moreover, non-English-schooled multilingualstudents would be expected to display more positive attitudes than English-schooled multi-linguals, because non-English schooling is likely to indicate a more substantial experiencewith another (i.e. non-Australian) culture than, say, the experience of an Australian-raisedstudent who grew up speaking a language other than English at home. Note that this is notto suggest that students alike with respect to local/international status, mono/multilingualismand/or language of schooling are culturally homogenous, only that they are likely to sharea degree of cultural experience.

Third, having examined the relation between certain personal (i.e. prior multiculturalexperience) and contextual (i.e. year level of unit) variables and student attitudes towardsmixed group work, our analytic focus will then shift to examining the tangible outcomes ofthose attitudes. Specifically, it will investigate whether, at the beginning of students’ groupprojects, those who self-select into mixed work groups display more favourable attitudestowards doing assignments in mixed groups than students who join non-mixed groups. Thequestion here is whether reported attitudes towards mixed group work correspond toobserved behaviours in relation to mixed group work. Despite the intuitive appeal of theidea that people’s behaviour is driven by their attitudes, the often weak correspondencebetween attitudes and behaviour has been well-established in the social psychological liter-ature (Fishbein and Ajzen 1974; Wicker 1969). Thus, an empirical verification of a signif-icant attitude–behaviour relationship in this case would strengthen our argument thatunderstanding the factors affecting students’ attitudes towards mixed group work is impor-tant for the development of strategies to increase their capacity for engaging in multiculturalwork collaborations.

Our fourth question is whether, and in what way, students’ attitudes towards working inculturally mixed groups change over the course of their participation in a specific, assessedgroup task. Furthermore, do the variables of: (1) year of study (i.e. first, second or thirdyear), (2) mono/multilingualism, and/or (3) cultural mix of one’s work group have a bearingon the patterns of pre- to post-task attitudinal comparisons that are observed? Students whowork in groups composed of either entirely international or entirely local students areexpected to demonstrate no attitudinal change from pre- to post-task, as their group workaffords no new experiences with intercultural collaboration. This is expected to be the casefor students from both monocultural and multicultural backgrounds (again, operationalisedin terms of mono/multilingualism). On the other hand, students who participate in a cultur-ally mixed group are expected to display more positive attitudes towards working in cultur-ally mixed groups at the end of the group task, as the task represents an opportunity forstudents to increase their familiarity and comfort with intercultural collaboration. Of these

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students who participate in culturally mixed groups, those who (1) are from monocultural,English-schooled backgrounds, and (2) are in earlier years of study, are expected to displaythe greatest differences between their pre- and post-task attitudes, because they are likely tohave had fewer opportunities for experience with other cultures in the past. Students frommulticultural backgrounds, and those in later years of study, are expected to display lesschange on the ground that multicultural group work would not be as new an experience forthem.

Method

Participants

Two hundred and thirty three students (154 local and 79 international), each enrolled in oneof three marketing units within the undergraduate business programme at an Australianuniversity (first year unit, n = 87; second year unit, n = 108; third year unit, n = 38) partic-ipated in the study. Of the international students, 44 were previously schooled in Asia, 16in Europe, 11 in Africa, seven in North America and one in Australia. Each of the units fromwhich participants were recruited included a semester-long group project as one of itsassessment components. In each unit, students self-selected into groups, had to prepare awritten report on a real-life marketing case and received a group mark for their project.Across units, 95 students formed groups consisting entirely of local students, 14 formedgroups composed entirely of international students, and 120 (56 local, 64 international)formed mixed groups that contained both local and international students. Four students, forwhom membership data was missing, were excluded from all analyses that took this variableinto account.

Instruments and procedure

Once ethics approval was obtained, data collection for the study involved students complet-ing a matched questionnaire at the beginning of their group project (once the groups hadbeen formed, but work on the assignment had not yet begun) and again at the end of theproject.

The questionnaire featured the Students’ Appraisals of Group Assignments (SAGA)instrument (Volet 2001). The SAGA instrument, based on principles of Rasch measurement(Andrich 1978), consists of seven subscales, each designed to measure a different dimen-sion of students’ appraisals of group assignments. Respondents indicate their level of agree-ment with each item statement on a four-point Likert scale (‘strongly disagree’ = 1,‘disagree’ = 2, ‘agree’ = 3, ‘strongly disagree’ = 4). Given the purposes of this article, onlyresponses to the Cultural Mix subscale were used in this study. This subscale is concernedwith students’ attitudes towards assignments being done in groups that are comprised ofboth local and international students. A sample item from this subscale is ‘whenever I can,I try to join groups that have both local and international students for team assignments’.

The Cultural Mix subscale was analysed separately according to the principles of Raschmeasurement (Andrich 1978). The software program, RUMM2020 (Andrich, Sheridan, andLuo 2000) was used to test how well the observed data fit the expectations of the measure-ment model. A Rasch analysis places estimates of item difficulty/severity and person ability(or level of a trait such as attitude) on the same hierarchical scale. In this study, higherperson estimates are taken to indicate more favourable attitudes towards that particulardimension of students’ appraisals of group assignments. Relating item severity to personability means that it was possible to show that persons responded to the scale in a consistent,

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logical manner. But, more importantly, it provided sophisticated psychometric informationabout the quality (validity and reliability) of the scale. In terms of the validity of the scale,the Rasch analysis showed that all items ‘fit’ the same underlying psychological construct.The overall fit statistic, item-trait chi square was 50.56, with p = 0.04 (df = 35), indicatingoverall fit of the data to the model. The estimate of reliability, equivalent to Cronbach alpha,was 0.82, which indicated good reliability. The analysis revealed that the rating scale cate-gories, in this case four, worked consistently for all items. It also showed that the items werenot biased towards a group within the sample. An item will be biased when different groupswithin the sample, despite equal levels of the underlying construct, respond in a differentmanner to an item.

The pre-task questionnaire also asked students to name the country in which theycompleted most of their schooling, and indicate whether they spoke any languages otherthan English.

Results

Relationship between unit year level and student’s appraisals of mixed group work

Our first research question was whether the conditions that students are exposed to atuniversity are sufficient to produce the desired positive shift in their attitudes towards mixedgroup work, as they progress through the first three years of their undergraduate studies. Aone-way ANOVA indicated that first (M = 1.13, SD = 1.65), second (M = 0.89, SD = 2.06)and third year students (M = 0.88, SD = 2.18) did not significantly differ in their pre-taskappraisals of mixed group work (F(2, 230) = 0.42, p = 0.659). This cross-sectional datasuggests that the experiences students are having as they progress through their tertiarystudies are not leading them to view mixed group work more favourably.

Prior multicultural experience – language of schooling and mono/multilingualism

Another critical issue is whether students’ previous multicultural experience – operationa-lised here in terms of their experience with multiple languages – influences their views aboutmulticultural group work. One-way ANOVAs were performed to investigate whether pre-task Cultural Mix scores differed across three student groupings – monolingual and schooledin English (N = 108, M = 0.27, SD = 1.86); multilingual and primarily schooled in English(N = 44, M = 1.13, SD = 1.76); and multilingual and primarily schooled in a language otherthan English (N = 81, M = 1.84, SD = 1.75). These categories were treated as three levelsof a single variable, labelled ‘language experience’. Significant main effects of this combinedlanguage experience variable on students’ pre-task scores were observed (F(2, 230) = 17.82,p < 0.001). The Scheffe post-hoc test indicated that the pre-task scores of monolingual,English-schooled students were significantly lower than the scores of both multilingual,English-schooled (p < 0.05), and multilingual, non-English-schooled students (p < 0.001).Thus, multilingualism was associated with more positive appraisals of multicultural groupwork. However, the pre-task scores of multilingual students who were primarily schooledin English did not differ significantly from those of multilingual, non-English-schooledstudents (p = 0.11).

A chi-square test revealed a significant association (X 2 = 73.72, df = 1, p < 0.001)between mono/multilingualism and local/international student status. The majority (92%) ofinternational students were multilingual, while 33% of local students were multilingual.While this indicates that students’ mono/multilingual characteristics were to some extentconfounded by international/local status, it was important to employ categories with a clear

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conceptual link to culture, rather than presupposing that a nominal international/localdistinction is synonymous with cultural difference and indicative of multicultural experi-ence. Experience with multiple languages is a more conceptually coherent indicator ofmulticultural experience, and, as noted above, was indeed associated with students’ apprais-als of mixing local and international students for group assignments. It was noted thatthe overwhelming majority (94%) of monolingual students were schooled in Australia.Except for one Zimbabwe-schooled student, the remaining 6% were schooled in Western,English-speaking countries.

Mixed and non-mixed group members’ pre-task appraisals of mixed group work

Another issue that is yet to be adequately addressed in the literature concerns the influenceof students’ attitudes on whether they self-select into a mixed or non-mixed group. An inde-pendent samples t-test comparing the pre-task Cultural Mix SAGA scores of students inmixed groups (N = 109, M = 0.42, SD = 1.97) and students in non-mixed groups (N = 120,M = 1.47, SD = 1.76), found a highly significant difference between the two group types(t(227) = −2.421, p < 0.001). At the beginning of students’ group assignments, students inmixed groups displayed more positive appraisals of mixed group work than did those innon-mixed groups.

Given past reports of local students’ reluctance to mix, as opposed to internationalstudents for whom intercultural mixing is more of a priority, further analyses wereconducted to see whether the association between appraisals of mixed group work and self-selection into a mixed or non-mixed group could be observed for both local and interna-tional students. Local students in mixed groups (N = 56, M = 1.03, SD = 1.85) displayedmore positive appraisals of mixed group work at the beginning of their project than did localstudents in non-mixed groups (N = 95, M = 0.22, SD = 1.86), t(149) = −2.59, p < 0.05.However, no significant difference was observed between international students in mixedgroups (N = 64, M = 1.85, SD = 1.60) and international students in non-mixed groups(N = 14, M = 1.80, SD = 2.23). This suggests that more negative pre-task attitudes wereassociated with self-selection into a non-mixed group for local students only. The pre-taskCultural Mix scores of international and local students in mixed and non-mixed groups areillustrated in Figure 1.Figure 1. The pre-task cultural mix scores of international and local students in mixed and non-mixed groups.

Differences between students’ pre- and post-task Cultural Mix SAGA scores according to year level and mono/multilingualism

The next phase of our analysis examined the changes in students’ appraisals of mixed groupwork that took place over the course of their group project. Table 1 displays the pre- andpost-task Cultural Mix SAGA scores according to year level and mono/multilingualism. Italso shows the results of paired t-tests conducted to determine whether different categoriesof students, determined on the basis of these variables, each displayed different attitudestowards mixed group work at post-task than they did at pre-task. The participants as a wholedisplayed significantly less favourable attitudes at post-task than at pre-task, as did first yearand second year students. The similar trend for third year students was not significant,which could be related to sample size.

Similarly, monolingual students displayed lower post-task scores than their pre-taskscores, but significant differences between pre- and post-task scores were not observedwithin any of the three year levels of monolingual students. Multilingual students as a wholealso reported more negative attitudes towards mixed group work at post-task than they did

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364 M. Summers and S. Volet

at pre-task, as did first year multilingual students, but the pre- and post-scores of second andthird year multilingual students were not significantly different. In short, students’ apprais-als of mixed group work were, on average, more negative at the end than at the beginningof their project, irrespective of whether they were mono- or multilingual.

0.00

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Figure 1. The pre-task cultural mix scores of international and local students in mixed andnon-mixed groups.

Table 1. Differences between students’ pre- and post-task Cultural Mix SAGA scores according toyear level and mono/multilingualism.

Pre-task Post-task

N Mean SD Mean SD t

Unit year levelAll 233 0.96 1.93 0.60 2.23 3.53**First year 87 1.13 1.65 0.77 1.76 2.07*Second year 108 0.89 2.06 0.57 2.32 2.10*Third year 38 0.88 2.18 0.27 2.86 1.96

MonolingualAll 109 0.28 1.86 −0.05 2.10 2.03*First year 52 0.66 1.54 0.47 1.81 0.82Second year 46 0.13 2.00 −0.16 2.05 1.24Third year 11 −0.83 2.24 −2.07 2.46 1.68

MultilingualAll 124 1.58 1.79 1.17 2.19 2.97**First year 35 1.82 1.57 1.23 1.60 2.46*Second year 62 1.46 1.93 1.11 2.37 1.69Third year 27 1.57 1.76 1.23 2.46 1.11

Note: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.

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Differences between students’ pre- and post-task Cultural Mix SAGA scores according to their membership in a mixed or non-mixed group

Finally, the responses of mixed and non-mixed group members were analysed separately,to determine whether differences between students’ pre- and post-task Cultural MixSAGA scores were observed for each of these two groups; t-tests indicated that members ofnon-mixed groups reported significantly lower Cultural Mix SAGA scores at post-task thanat pre-task, but members of mixed groups did not display significant differences between theirpre- and post-task appraisals. Non-significant differences between pre- and post-task scoreswere observed for both monolingual and multilingual members of mixed groups. Multilingualmembers of non-mixed groups reported significantly lower post-task scores relative to theirpre-task scores, but significant differences between the pre- and post-task scores of mono-lingual members of non-mixed groups were not found. Mean pre- and post-task scores for eachof these student categories are reported in Table 2, along with t-test results for all pre- andpost-task comparisons. Patterns of change within each category are represented in Figure 2.Figure 2. Differences between students’ pre- and post-task appraisals of mixed group work by group type and mono/multilingualism.

Discussion

While increasing students’ propensity to engage in intercultural work collaborations iscentral to the aims of internationalisation, the question of how students’ experiences atuniversity impact upon their attitudes towards culturally mixed group work has receivedlittle empirical attention. The preceding analysis sought to examine whether students atdifferent stages of their undergraduate studies differ in their attitudes towards mixed groupwork. It also represents one of the first systematic analyses of what happens to students’ atti-tudes towards culturally mixed group work during an actual group work experience. Eachof the study’s main findings will now be discussed in turn.

Unit year level bore no significant relation to students’ pre-task attitudes towards assign-ments being done in culturally mixed groups. That is, significant attitudinal differencesaccording to students’ enrolment in a first, second or third year unit were not observed,though it is worth noting that a statistically non-significant pattern of less positive attitudesin later years of study was observed. In the absence of any obvious reason to suspect cohorteffects to have exerted an influence here, given that only two years of study are required toprogress from first to third year, the most plausible interpretation of these results is that

Table 2. Differences between students’ pre- and post-task appraisals of mixed group work by grouptype and mono/multilingualism.

Pre-task Post-task

N Mean SD Mean SD t

Non-mixedAll 109 0.42 1.97 −0.09 2.21 3.25*Monolingual 69 −0.01 1.72 −0.28 2.15 1.10Multilingual 40 1.16 2.17 0.15 2.34 4.30**

MixedAll 120 1.46 1.76 1.28 1.97 1.35Monolingual 37 0.74 1.96 0.44 1.77 1.23Multilingual 83 1.79 1.56 1.66 1.95 0.80

Note: *p < 0.01; **p < 0.001.

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students’ attitudes towards culturally mixed group work are not becoming more positivethroughout their first three years of study. Of course, one should be cautious in generalisingthese findings to other courses of study and other universities, given that all participantswere recruited from a single business school. Furthermore, the similar Cultural Mix scoresof first, second and third year multilingual students could be due in part to a ceiling effect:the already positive Cultural Mix attitudes of first year multilingual students may leave littlescope for their attitudes to become significantly more positive as they progress through theirstudies.

However, if a desired by-product of the internationalisation of Australian universities isto increase students’ willingness to engage in work collaborations with people of othernationalities, the results are surely troubling, for there was no sign of increasingly positiveappraisals in later years. A strong possibility here is that students’ self-selection into mixedor non-mixed work groups throughout their studies has meant that the students most likelyto have developed more positive attitudes as a result of regular mixed group work experi-ences are the same students who managed to avoid these experiences. This in turn raises aquestion which future research should address; whether adopting a policy of compulsoryculturally mixed group work (either self-selected or tutor-allocated) would lead to a positiveattitudinal shift (or at least, the absence of a negative shift) amongst those students whowould not otherwise have such experiences.

As hypothesised, students’ past experience with different cultures, operationalised interms of their past experience with multiple languages, was associated with their attitudestowards working in culturally mixed groups. Monolingual, English-schooled studentsreported more negative attitudes at pre-task than multilingual students. This finding is in linewith the view that intercultural experience leads to more favourable views of multiculturalgroup work, by exposing individuals to the benefits of cultural mixing, and allowing themto develop the skills for navigating multicultural group work situations more successfully.English- and non-English-schooled multilingual students did not differ in their pre-task atti-tudes; that their Cultural Mix attitudes were relatively similar suggests that multilingualismis a more influential factor in these students’ attitudes than their language of schooling.

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Figure 2. Differences between students’ pre- and post-task appraisals of mixed group work bygroup type and mono/multilingualism.

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However, the experiences of non-English-schooled students were sufficiently different todifferentiate them more clearly from monolingual students (p < 0.001 as opposed to p < 0.05for English-schooled multilinguals). Overall, these findings are congruent with the view thatpast intercultural experience begets future intercultural collaboration, highlighting theimportance of increasing students’ intercultural experiences at university.

An important consideration when assessing the implications of observed relationshipsbetween individual and contextual variables on one hand, and students’ appraisals of multi-cultural group work on the other, is the attitude-behaviour relationship. That is, are studentswho report more positive attitudes towards working with members of other cultures morelikely to self-select into culturally mixed groups when given the chance? Our results dosuggest that pre-task attitudes play a role in students’ self-selection into either a mixed ornon-mixed group. Given that the questionnaire instructed students to respond according totheir views about the group work in the present unit context, this finding is consistent withpast research evidence that correspondence between attitudes and behaviour increases withincreasing attitudinal specificity (Fishbein and Ajzen 1974).

However, in the case of international students who form groups composed only of otherinternational students, their own pre-task attitudes cannot account for their membership ina non-mixed group. As expected, local students whose groups consisted entirely of otherlocal students reported significantly more negative pre-task attitudes towards mixed groupwork than did students who worked in mixed groups. However, the pre-task attitudes ofinternational students whose groups consisted entirely of other international students did notdiffer significantly from those of international students who worked in mixed groups.Rather, members of non-mixed international groups reported significantly more positivepre-task attitudes than students who formed local-only groups. This lends itself to the inter-pretation that it was primarily the more negative attitudes of local students who favourednon-mixed group work that posed a barrier to international students joining mixed groups.

Whether or not international students find their way into mixed groups appears to havelittle to do with their own attitudes towards working in mixed groups of local and interna-tional students. This finding concurs with previous accounts of local students not pursuingintercultural mixing (Ledwith and Seymour 2001; Ward 2001), though Smart, Volet, andAng (2000) reported that both international and local students aspired to intercultural expe-rience through mixing. Our results thus provide further support for the view that interven-tions aimed at increasing local students’ willingness to work on group assignments withinternational students are required to enhance students’ intercultural competence via inter-cultural work experience, and to provide international students who aim to maximise theirintercultural experiences at university with more opportunities to fulfil their goal.

Group assignments present one such opportunity, which led us to investigate howstudents’ attitudes towards mixed group work change over the course of their participationin a group project. The observed comparisons of students’ pre- and post-task appraisals ofmixed group work gives cause for concern, for wherever significant differences weredetected between students’ pre- and post-task attitudes, observed changes were in the direc-tion of more negative attitudes by the end of the group project. Interestingly, even for thosestudent categories that displayed no significant differences between pre- and post-taskappraisals of mixed group work, reported attitudes were more negative at the end than at thebeginning of the task, without exception. In the future, researchers may wish to employ alonger time lag between the end of the project and the post-task questionnaire, and comparestudents’ pre- and post-task appraisals of other aspects of group work, to investigatewhether these results may be part of a more general trend towards negative evaluations ofgroup work immediately following a group work experience. This issue is currently being

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investigated using all dimensions measured by the SAGA instrument (Kimmel and Volet,submitted).

On their own, however, our results suggest that students’ experiences of group work atuniversity are not serving the educational and social goals of internationalisation. Bothmonolingual and multilingual student groups reported lower scores at post-task than at pre-task, suggesting that students’ prior intercultural experience through language is not on itsown a major factor in the changes in student attitudes that take place over the course of agroup assignment. Pre- to post-task attitudinal comparisons by unit year level showed thatall significant differences were for students in earlier years of study. This is consistent withthe view that, in later years of study, students have more prior experiences of group workon which to base their views about group work, meaning that each subsequent experienceof group work has less of an influence on their attitudes towards working in mixed groups.This suggests that students’ early experiences at university are particularly important fortheir development of the necessary skills and willingness to engage in group work withpeople of other cultures.

In the context of a general trend towards increasingly negative attitudes towards multi-cultural group work over the course of students’ group projects, the results concerningstudents’ membership in mixed versus non-mixed groups take on a heightened significance.Students who chose to work on assignments in culturally mixed groups displayed no signif-icant change in their attitudes towards mixed group work from the beginning to the end oftheir project. These findings are consistent with Volet and Ang’s (1998) qualitative data,showing that students who had an experience of mixed group work reported that, althoughthe experience was not a problem for them, they did not feel more inclined to deliberatelyseek another experience of mixed group work in the future. On the other hand, the attitudesof student participants in the present study who self-selected into non-mixed work groupsbecame more negative over the course of their project. In terms of the educational and socialgoals of internationalisation, the absence of attitudinal change seen in mixed groups isclearly the more favourable outcome. Furthermore, the lack of a ‘positive’ attitudinal shiftin mixed groups gives little cause for concern, given their more positive attitudes than non-mixed groups at pre-task, and their members’ demonstrated willingness to engage in mixedgroup work. Thus, our results suggest a link between ‘experience’ of mixed group work andmore positive outcomes with respect to students’ ‘attitudes’ towards mixed group work.That is, intercultural mixing in group assignment contexts appears to play a role in at leastmaintaining existing attitudes towards multicultural work collaborations. Additionally, inthe light of Watson, Kumar, and Michaelsen’s (1993) finding that the performance advan-tages of culturally diverse teams became manifest only after 17 weeks of collaboration, it ispossible that longer culturally mixed group assignments than the ones we analysed (e.g.group research projects spanning two semesters) may generate more promising attitudinalresults. Future research should explore this possibility.

Particularly striking was the finding that it was multilingual students, whose attitudeswere originally positive, who experienced the most significant change towards more nega-tive attitudes following an experience of non-mixed group work. This is certainly puzzling,and further research should explore possible reasons for this pattern. It could be, for exam-ple, that students who participate in non-mixed group work generally come to hold morenegative attitudes towards mixed group work than they did prior to their involvement withthe group, but that, in this case, monolingual students’ attitudes were already negativerestricted opportunities for an additional negative shift by the end of the project. For multi-lingual students, who theoretically are expected to have had a richer history of interculturalexperience than monolingual students, and began their task with relatively positive attitudes,

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participation in a non-mixed group represented somewhat of a step back in their willingnessto engage in intercultural work collaborations. This is certainly a troubling finding, requiringfuture exploration of why this may have been the case, and pointing to the possibility thatit is particularly important for students with multicultural backgrounds to experience mixedgroup work, in order to avoid the undesired changes that are observed in these students whenthey do not have such experiences.

When taken together, our findings provide support for the view that universities shouldtake measures to promote culturally mixed group assignment work in order to achieve theeducational and social goals of internationalisation. As indicated by the apparent lack of apositive attitudinal shift with each additional year of undergraduate study, students’ experi-ences at university do not appear to be having the desired impact with respect to interculturalcompetence, despite the multicultural nature of the student population. There is no evidence,either from Volet and Ang’s (1998) qualitative analysis of students’ experiences of mixedgroup work, or from our quantitative examination of students’ attitudes following a mixedgroup work experience, to suggest that students who have an experience of mixed groupwork perceive that it was problematic for them. In the future, researchers may wish tocombine these two approaches in order to compare the experiences of students who displaydifferent attitudinal profiles, and different pre- to post-attitudinal trajectories. Until then, theavailable research evidence should go some way towards appeasing previously documentedhesitation (Smart, Volet, and Ang 2000) on the part of teachers in relation to the encourage-ment of intercultural mixing for group assignments. Still needing to be addressed, however,is the question of what factors – social, cognitive, behavioural, etc. – are responsible for thedifferential impact of mixed versus non-mixed group work on students’ attitudes that weobserved, pointing to a promising line of inquiry for future research. Finally, the questionof what contextual factors (e.g. unit content and structure, task and teaching variables) maycontribute to students giving more negative appraisals of culturally mixed group work atpost-task also needs to be addressed.

AcknowledgementThis research was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council (DP0666993).

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