Abstract:

The paper is commenting on the evaluation of an long-established residential summer school on cultural heritage preservation in what concerns students' motivation and expectations towards trans-national inter-disciplinary intensive programmes. Since the latter represent a substantial overload of information that is often too rapidly discarded, the success of every concentrated classroom course is ultimately largely depending upon the personal commitment of participants to retain and apply the knowledge and skills they have gained.
In addition, when a multi- or interdisciplinary topic is confronted, the cognitive background of attendees is often so diversified that the didactic material can by no means be easily assimilated.
Motivations and expectations are powerful forces in education, assuring long-term sustainable learning outcomes. In science education, major descriptors for the affective domain encompass motivation, beliefs and emotions, whereas knowledge and thinking are considered descriptors for the content and processing of the human mind. Expectations are related to the link between theory and practice – what did students really learn compared to what they were expected to learn, cognitively, behaviorally and affectively.
This paper examines how motivation and expectations affect students originating from European or non-European (mostly Arab-Mediterranean) countries, and taking part in the abovementioned inter-disciplinary summer school. The study is addressing the research question whether attendees’ expectations and motivation fluctuate across cultures. In this frame students were divided into two groups according to their place of provenance, expectations and motivation as they develop in each group were thorougly observed and described, and all possible differentiations have been tested.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary, Trans-national, intensive programmes, motivation, expectations.