International students have diverse needs when undertaking education in Australian universities. It is in the interest of both international students and the host institution to ensure these students achieve success in their studies. This study builds on previous research and explores, from the students’ perspective, the academic adjustment experiences of undergraduate international Business students from Chinese Confucian heritage cultural backgrounds at Victoria University, Australia. A qualitative methodology, using principles of grounded theory, was used for the study. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted for data collection. The transcribed data was analysed under focus questions and themes identified in the literature review using open and fixed grids.
The dissertation documents the academic experiences of the cohort of students studied, focusing on the significant cultural factors which impinged on their adjustment; and discusses the emerging patterns, processes of the adjustment, strategies for future students to adjust well, and implications for curriculum development and delivery. The results of this study have suggested that cultural and educational backgrounds play a significant role in students’ adjustment. The systematic building by academics and administrators of formal and informal mechanisms in Australian universities, which value students’ cultural diversity and develop inclusive curricula, is to enrich the learning experiences of all students.
Many economic problems can be formulated as dynamic games in which strategically interacting agents choose actions that determine the current and future levels of a single capital stock. Consider, for example, a single stock of an exhaustible or reproductive resource that is simultaneously exploited by several agents that do not cooperate. Each agent chooses an extraction strategy to maximise the discounted stream of future utility.
The actions taken by agents not only determine their levels of utility but also the level of the capital stock. Alternatively, look at the problem that agents voluntarily contribute to a single public stock of capital, like a park or a church. They choose their contributions (investments in the public stock of capital) to maximise the discounted stream of utility from consuming the public stock net of investment costs. Private investment builds up the public stock of capital that eventually can be consumed by all agents.
Legislators pursue legal reform with the aim of achieving or furthering some identified public policy objective. Traditionally, legal scholars tried to assure that formal statutory provisions and rules of court produced the desired outcomes, and that deviations from such outcomes were mere errors. On the other hand, law and society scholars have asserted that this view ignores some fundamental explanations for the wide deviation between the law on the books and the law in action.
These scholars point to numerous studies that indicate substantial gaps, and at times a total disparity, between the formal substantive rules on the books and the actual implementation of the rules on the ground. In addition to the disparity between the formal laws and the laws in action, these scholars note the important, and at times, dramatic variations in the implementation of the law from one locale to another, despite the similarity in formal rules.
