Abstract:

In the last decades, Higher Education has undergone an important transformation in most countries. Different factors such as globalization, tech revolution or even the new work organization framework which demands new generic competencies towards specific knowledge, foster new educational needs to turn up, which affect the university system. One result of these changes is manifested in the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This common educational space emphasizes in class students’ active process learning.

Society’s changing requirements favors a rising interuniversity mobility. This mobility has also been fostered by the creation of several student exchange programs such as the Erasmus program.

The internationalization of universities is an established fact that will become even more relevant in coming years. It is relevant to highlight that foreign students have to go through a cultural adaptation process which generates social, behavioral and affective changes, among others. Within this context, the study of the international student behavior and his/her experience at the university seems an interesting research topic. Despite of this interest, there are only a few research papers that analyze the international student characteristics related to academic factors such as class attendance or academic performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of students’ absenteeism on academic records based on the observation of 225 international students in a two-academic-years period; in addition, the impact of average grade during the stay, and teacher evaluation on academic performance is also analyzed.

We found a negative relation between grade and number of classed missed and a smaller impact of this variable in females.

By running a cluster analysis, we found 3 different students groups characterized by their academic performance in the stay, absenteeism rates, and teacher evaluations. In addition, we found a direct linear relation between academic performance, average academic records and teachers’ evaluation.

Keywords:

International students, attendance, performance, absenteeism, cluster analysis.