The Impact Of IBDP On High School Students' Intercultural Competence Development

With the development of science and technology,also a boom of economy,globalization has become the characteristics and requirement of the modern society.“Going out”and“bringing in”,“labor”or“human resources”,“entity”to “virtual world”,the global mobility occurs every where and every day.How to deal with the conflicts amongst different cultures,how to communicate properly,and how to face the unknown future etc.,has become more and more important so that educators shall focus more on the study of intercultural awareness and competence of new generation.This thesis is mainly based on the intercultural education philosophy raised by UNESCO,and the literature review includes the concept of intercultural competence,its dimension and the assessment.There is also a brief introduction on the International Baccalaureate which,as a kind of intercultural education,may affect or push students' intercultural competences.The author selected one IB school in Nanjing(which is a top school and runs both national curriculum and IB curriculum),tried to analyse the feasibility of high school students' intercultural training or education.Questionnaire survey and interview are used as research methods in this thesis.The questionnaire includes 24-item 5 points Likert-style self-rating scales with the dimensions of intercultural knowledge,intercultural attitude,intercultural skills and intercultural awareness,as well as a number of short answer questions and situational questions.The main finding of the study is: IBDP students have a relative higher level intercultural competence,comparing with those from other international curriculum.Most IB students agree that the programme helped a lot in their international mindedness and intercultural competences,especially Language A literature and English B learning plus core course(TOK and CAS for example).And it helps in their English communication and critical thinking.Accordingly,IB teachers are expected to be more critical.It is also found that mental health education and labor education shall be practiced to better balance their growth.Based on the findings above,the author puts forward the following suggestions: The educational department or the schools shall integrate the IB curriculum with the local curriculum and promote local teacher faculty's personal development,meanwhile,implement policies to encourage IB teachers get involved in teaching and research,practice the localization of the IB programme,take students' mental health education and labor education into consideration when running the IB programme.While for other international courses,it is not wise to ignore or look down on local culture and knowledge.Indeed,to develop their international mindedness,students shall learn more about their own cultures and heritage etc.At the end of this thesis,the author discusses the insufficiency of the study and the next step for future research,for example,to improve the questionnaire,to investigate more schools and students,etc.And it will be another good research question on how to practice localization of IB.