It is a known fact that is plastered across every study abroad brochure and every school’s mission statement. If you travel to a new place or make your school as “multicultural” as possible, students will be transformed into thoughtful “citizens of the world.” It is a genuinely admirable belief, and it is entirely false.

Before you get all bent out of shape, let me explain…

Schools are better places when they bring people together with an eye to diversity for an almost endless list of reasons, including that students from all groups wind up smarter than if they had studied in more homogeneous environments. People who travel to a new culture are undoubtedly transformed by the experience. To be clear, I am an advocate for both situations, but taking students on trips or making your school more diverse won’t result in higher levels of Intercultural Competence. It is just the first step in making that growth possible.

I like to refer to this as “Field of Dreams Syndrome.” If we take the kids to Kenya, they will understand cultural difference, or if we admit kids to our school from all over the world, the result will be profound intercultural understanding. FOD Syndrome turns the acquisition of Intercultural Competence into a transaction. If only it were that easy. It’s not. Like most things of value in life, it’s not enough just to show up. You have to work at it.

I know this because I spent several years of my life testing the theory. Yes, Intercultural competence is something that can be measured. While there are several ways to do so, most researchers use a tool called the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) - which is based on the work of Dr. Milton Bennett and his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity.

Stay with me here…I am going to keep this part short…

Bennett’s work puts all of us on a sliding scale from a completely ethnocentric worldview to a completely ethnorelative one - from complete denial that cultural differences exist to a reality in which the subject can fluidly move between cultures with a high degree of skill. Bennett throws in some stages along the scale, and the IDI puts numbers on it to measure Intercultural Competence quantitatively. If you want a description that won’t make Bennett want to throw rocks at me, you can go here.

In the early part of the 2010s, I was able to run a multi-year study on the effects of cultural immersion (in this case, year-long study abroad) on growth in Intercultural Competence and creativity. I worked with 120 high school students studying abroad in Europe, and a group of about 60 students spread out across the United States as a control group. I used a pre-post testing strategy and intervened in no other way other than just giving the test.

The IDI gives subjects a score of between 55 and 145 (although you rarely see extremes). It also gives you two scores, where you fall on the scale and where you think you fall on the scale. News flash: People overestimate their intercultural competence BY A LOT.

In the fall, I tested both groups. Their scores looked like this:

This was good. The groups were similar. In the fall I tested again. Here’s what I found:

Yeah. Exactly. Not much happened. Both groups improved a tiny bit - an amount so small that it wasn’t even statistically significant. It also turns out that tons of others have done similar studies with the same results. You can see some of those here, here, and here. These were students who had just spent nine months abroad living with a host family, and they didn’t improve.

Well,

 …that’s not totally accurate either…

The data in the chart above is the group average of all participants. Of course, groups are made up of individuals. When you look closer, you see that while most students stayed about the same, some made decent gains. Perhaps more surprising is that an equal number actually went backward. The effect of the experience actually made them less Interculturally Competent.

It’s not exactly the stuff you put in your promotional material.

So I followed up with a second stage to the study. I designed a case study using a small group of students in the same program. We worked together throughout the year in group meetings and through individual mentoring. We talked about the challenges of understanding other cultures and worked through difficulties. I only had one requirement to be part of the group: You had to try. It worked:

Even though the students in the case study started the year at a higher level (making growth more difficult), they grew at a rate four times that of the first study abroad group and ten times the rate of the students who stayed home. Also, every member of the group made positive growth. No one went backward.
So yeah, you have to work at it. But when you approach Intercultural Competence as a skill and then dig deep, practice, fail and practice some more, you can predictably expect results, and let’s face it, the world could use more people with Intercultural Competence right now. Let’s get to work.