Research On Students’ Academic Satisfaction With Sino-Foreign Joint Postgraduates Programs

Joint postgraduate education among China and other countries has been gradually developed in the past decade, and become an important means of the internationalization of Chinese higher education. There has also been more and more study regarding to Sino-Foreign joint postgraduate programs, however, detailed, deep quantitative research is still rare. This research focused on the issue of students’ academic satisfaction based on the case of joint postgraduates program between H University and ENS.The overall 81 students enrolled in this program were the sample of questionnaires, and their answers were used as the original data. Afterwards, interviews were conducted among some students and management staff (16 in total), and the derived data was utilized as reference. This research then conducted a comprehensive analysis about the students’academic satisfaction in the case, measuring their basic academic satisfaction, group academic satisfaction difference, importance of academic satisfaction indicators, influencing factors of academic satisfaction and academic difference with the students who did not enroll in this program.Field research indicated four findings. Firstly, students’overall academic satisfaction level is between "somewhat satisfied" and "satisfied". Course Teaching was chosen as the most powerful factor category that influenced academic satisfaction. Second, teaching method and content of French grammar course, as well as teaching content of Sino-French class specialty course were asked to be improved as soon as possible. Moreover, it is also urgent to provide more opportunities of intercollegiate/international academic exchange. The third finding is that there was no significant difference in the overall academic satisfaction due to different gender, academic background or grade of students, while these groups did differ from each other in certain aspects. For instance, students major in Social Science showed less satisfaction about eight indicators (educational method of French grammar course, design of the specialty course of Sino-French class, etc.)than their peers major in Natural Science. Finally, students enrolled in the joint postgraduate program hoped to be able to choose their Chinese mentors in an earlier, different way, and could get more customized advices from their teachers.According to the results of investigation, six management strategies were proposed to enhance students’ academic satisfaction:improving the teaching system and teaching quality, establish a supervisor-database and encourage the Sino-French cooperation among the supervisors, establish a cooperative relationship with enterprises to achieve win-win situations, expand the ways of cooperation with ENS, build students’ academic satisfaction evaluation system and improve the joint mechanism.