Embedded Study Abroad for First Year Students: The Instructional Design of Syllabi for Curricular Internationalizatio

The Arcadia University Preview Program for First Year and Transfer Students (Preview) is a program design built into the university curriculum to allow all First Year and Transfer Students the opportunity to study abroad. The Previews are an institution-wide strategy of academic and administrative procedures to provide an action to meet the vision, need, and circumstances that are particular to the university's internationalization dimension. The Preview courses are 2-credit courses taught in the spring semester that last for six to eight weeks, and include a 1-week trip to an international location.;The purpose of this Executive Position Paper is to describe how professors design the learning environment of their embedded study abroad courses. In doing so, the work connects these design characteristics to best practices in study abroad and describes student experiences using course evaluation questionnaire data.;The initial goal is to document the instructional design of the Preview courses. The second goal is to determine the relationships between the course subject matter, learning goals, assessment strategies, and field study activities in the Preview syllabi. The third goal is to compare these elements in the Preview syllabi to good practices in study abroad course design. The final goal is to compare the coded syllabi content to the data from student course evaluations completed after students return from the international field study over the 'Spring Break' week. These findings contextualize embedded study abroad as part of education abroad curriculum, describe principles of good practice for the design of embedded study abroad courses, and suggest some implications that syllabi design may have for student learning.