| The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes and characteristics of first-time, full-time foreign freshmen at the University of Arkansas. It also sought to discover dissimilarities between attitudes and characteristics of the University's foreign freshmen, and the attitudes and characteristics of its American freshmen. The secondary purpose of the study was to produce and pilot a model for its process that other colleges and universities could replicate for the investigation of their own foreign freshmen, or other freshmen sub-populations.; The Higher Education Research Institute's nation-wide Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshmen Survey served as the foundation for this secondary study. During the 1999–2000 implementation of the CIRP survey at the University of Arkansas, a coding technique was used to separate the foreign freshmen surveys from the American freshmen surveys. This process resulted in the creation of two separate and distinct data reports: University of Arkansas foreign freshmen CIRP survey responses, and University of Arkansas American freshmen CIRP survey responses.; The data reports from the survey were presented in nine general categories, including personal characteristics, family background, educational characteristics, financial characteristics, college choice characteristics, self-appraisal, social and political attitudes, student activities, and goals and objectives. The study aligned the international responses against the American responses for all nine categories, on a question-by-question basis, and the data sets were presented as tables.; For each survey question in each category, percentage gaps between the responses of the foreign freshmen and the responses of the American freshmen were calculated. For some of the categories, supplemental foreign freshmen interviews were conducted in an effort to add deeper information pertaining to the survey inquiries, in the form of candid student commentary.; Finally, narrative summaries of the survey and interview findings for each of the nine categories were provided. The summaries paid particular attention to those survey areas that revealed 10% or greater percentage gaps between the two freshmen groups.; This study sought to provide useful information for University of Arkansas faculty and staff pertaining to the unique attitudes and characteristics of their incoming international students. With this information, practitioners could understand their international students better, and consequently improve academic and non-academic services for this special student population.; Some of the findings included: (a) the University's foreign freshmen are more selective in choosing colleges than American freshmen, and are more reliant on Internet resources for information; (b) the University's foreign freshmen were generally older than American Freshmen; (c) while the University's foreign freshmen were generally better prepared academically, were more well-read, and made better use of library resources, many had limited experience dealing with the American classroom style of collaborative study and open discussion; (d) the average family income for the University's foreign freshmen was considerably less than the average family income for the University's American freshmen. |
