Abstract:

We present an innovative educational project dedicated to improve the academic performance of foreign students by enhancing the integration of international students during their academic attendance in the programs offered at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Forest Engineering (Spain).

After a first stage in the previous year in which a specific protocol of tutoring and mentoring for international students was designed, first results structured in multipurpose goals by recommendations and actions for the tutorial program in the first month of the 2012-13 academic year were provided.These tutorial activities were hold by a group of 12 interested professors and supported by a mentoring group of volunteer students. The application of a specific protocol was based on the experience of previous reports of former student's academic profiles with general information about their provenance, courses that they had applied, and new contributions provided by a survey performed in 2012 which evaluated the degree of satisfaction and performance of current and former foreign students.

Main results, discussion and conclusions after the application of this new protocol were provided in this communication. Results were analyzed in order to detect the weak points that should be improved according to the survey's areas that were perceived to be low satisfaction and high importance. The improvements obtained were tested with the new tutorial actions that were applied. These results, recommendations and the protocol could be helpful for further actions to be developed in other universities.

Keywords:

Higher Education, international students, surveys, forest engineering, innovative educational project, environmental science, academic advising.