Early in the semester this fall, I gave my econometrics class an assignment that included an analysis of the relationship that might exist between poverty rates and student performance across school districts in the region. Students were asked to use economic analysis to state a hypothesis concerning the possible relationship between these variables. Approximately two-third of the students are from the U.S. and the remaining third are from China.
The U.S. students universally argued that students in schools with more poverty would perform less well on standardized tests. The arguments generally involved lower levels of initial human capital endowments due to lower parental education and resources and/or lower school quality because of the use of local property taxes to finance schools. This prediction is what I had anticipated. I had not, though, anticipated that nearly every Chinese student would argue that students from poorer areas would perform better on standardized tests. The argument was that students from low-income families had more incentive to work hard to escape from poverty.
This sort of cultural difference was something that I simply had not anticipated. Our understanding of the world is influenced by our culture and economic institutions in many ways that only become obvious when we interact with people who are part of different cultures and institutional frameworks. We learn most when we are confronted by situations that challenge our expectations and preconceptions. Multicultural experiences such as this provide many possibilities for such learning.
Around the same time, my office hosted a presentation by Jon Rubin, the Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online Learning (COIL). The COIL initiative involves pairing classes in the SUNY system with classes at foreign colleges and universities that investigate similar issues. Students in each class work together on joint projects that are shared and discussed using web 2.0 tools. This allows U.S. (and their foreign counterparts) to interact extensively with students from other cultures and nations without leaving their own countries. This weekend, I attended a COIL conference at SUNY-Purchase. (Representatives from 27 SUNY institutions, as well as several non-SUNY institutions were present at the conference.) There was a remarkable amount of energy and enthusiasm in the discussions at this conference.
Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, YouTube, and other media sharing sites, make it possible for students to share their work across international boundaries as easily as they share it with their domestic classmates. Skype, instant messaging systems, Facebook, Second Life (and other virtual worlds) make it possible for students to directly communicate with their international counterparts in real time at no cost (other than the cost of their time).
For students that cannot afford to participate in study abroad programs (and the vast majority of our students do not participate in these programs), such an arrangement provides a potential for intercultural and international interactions that would not otherwise exist. I’ve already begun to seek partners for my introductory microeconomics and labor economics classes and for my colleague Said Atri’s classes in international economics. There are, I believe, very strong possibilities for such possibilities in classes in language and cultures, the fine and performing arts, communications, sociology. psychology, political science, business administration, marketing, and even statistics (as the exam in my econometrics class suggested, even the comparison of simple correlations between variables can open up interesting discussions).
Posted by economicalthoughts 
