After a recent internal report cautioned that international graduate students were failing to complete programs at a high rate, the Graduate School is exploring a way to create an "Early Start" program to help those students adjust to life at Brown.
The program, which was recommended in a May report from the Working Group on Graduate Education, would incorporate English training for international students and technical training for students coming from non-research institutions, said Sheila Bonde, dean of the Graduate School.
While Bonde said that it is too soon to know what the program will look like because no funding has yet been secured, she said she hoped it would expand on an existing program targeted at incoming international students who plan to serve as teaching assistants.
Ideally, Bonde said, the program would be open "to all students."
In the report, the working group of 12 faculty members and two graduate students noted that in a review of program completion data, it was "struck by the patterns of attrition among minority and international students." The group recommended the creation of a multi-faceted "orientation to the American higher education system," including cultural immersion and language training.
Such a program, the group wrote in its report, would not only help more students complete their degrees on time, but also "send a powerful signal about Brown's commitment to diversity."
One of the difficulties in understanding trends in degree completion comes from the fact that the Graduate School has not kept data on why students fail to complete their degrees, Bonde said.
Furthermore, there has been no way to distinguish between "positive" and "negative" attrition for a given year, Bonde said - that is, between students who drop out and those who go on a maternity or other temporary leave. Students who enrolled in a doctoral degree program and left after completing a master's degree were also counted in the attrition figure.
"We really didn't understand the reasons for leave-taking as fully as we might," Bonde said. Consequently, the Graduate School will now record the reasons that students take leave in order to look for trends and ultimately to intervene to help a student make the right decision, she said.
The Graduate School currently has a grant to participate in a 10-year study examining doctoral program completion in-depth nationally, Bonde said, and the results from that study will help the administration better understand patterns of attrition at Brown.
Since the project is long-term, and since attrition figures cannot fully be calculated until the last student from a cohort (or class) has either completed a degree or withdrawn, full information will not be available for a number of years and the current graduate classes will only have partial data available for them, Bonde said.
"In data terms that's unsatisfactory, but in terms of being able to intervene to help a student, I think it's worth doing," she said.
The language classes, known as English for International Teaching Assistants, focus on improving speaking and listening skills and developing familiarity with slang words and phrases that students may use in the classroom, said Jill Scott, an instructor in the program.
After an intensive welcome program in August, any graduate student whose first language is not English is evaluated for English proficiency, said Barbara Gourlay, the program's coordinator. Students are then placed in appropriate-level, semester-long English classes, and are re-evaluated after each semester. The classes are not necessarily sequential since placement is determined each semester by evaluation.
Students in lower-level classes are assigned to an undergraduate student, called an ITA consultant, whom they meet with for one hour a week outside of class, Gourlay said. The undergraduates work one-on-one with the ITAs as conversation partners and report back to the teachers about their partners' improvement.The undergraduate consultants and ITAs have the freedom to do whatever they want during their weekly meetings, Gourlay said. She said the purpose of the meetings is not only language support, but to help the ITAs understand different aspects of the culture.
"We once had a wonderful Vietnamese student who wanted to order food but was overwhelmed by the choices," she said, so during a weekly meeting his undergraduate consultant helped him navigate a menu.
"You know, describing abstract thought is not easy," wrote Joey Lee GS, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mathematics from South Korea, in an e-mail to The Herald. "Sometimes even though I got a solid idea, I couldn't find the word to explain."
Lee was part of the ITA consultant program for over two years. "I think that it's absolutely helpful," he said. "It's the only chance of correcting my intonation and pronunciation."
Lee also said the program helped him better understand American culture.
There are 83 graduate students currently enrolled in the English for ITA program, 30 of whom have undergraduate consultants, but Gourlay said she often receives requests from international graduate students not enrolled in the lower-level English classes who also want undergraduate consultants. Budget restrictions, unfortunately, often prevent her from hiring more.
"Ideally," Bonde said, "there would be English language support for any student who needs it."
