Abstract:

Before COVID-19, we at Toyo Gakuen University developed a questionnaire on Global Mindset to gauge student interest in and feeling of connection to the rest of the world. This work, presented at INTED 2017 and 2018, is based on a motivational self system related to language learning that was developed by Professor Kikuchi in Japan, and is related to motivation research conducted by Zoltán Dörnyei. The goal has been to understand how students are interested in the world, and also to find ways to promote greater interest. During the global pandemic, Japanese society closed down, and social interactions of all kinds became more limited. With the pandemic well finished, inbound tourism has provided many opportunities for Japanese to once again interact with people from other cultures. At the same time, interest in other cultures seems to be increasing again. At Toyo Gakuen University in Japan, the number of students who study abroad is recovering to pre-pandemic levels. The goal of this research is to compare the Global Mindset of current students with those from eight years ago. To investigate this issue, the original questionnaire has been updated with both improved and new items. A Rasch analysis is used, anchoring the original items at the 2017 values to place current students on the original measurement scale. The distribution of students on each sub-construct is then directly compared. In this presentation, we summarize the conceptualization of Global Mindset and present the results of how our students have changed.

Keywords:

Global, Mindset, Rasch.