Study abroad programs are considered a “high impact practice” that can help university students build important global competencies. Often, study abroad courses are short-term in nature (lasting three weeks or less) and are created and led by a professor with expertise in an international course topic. While the instructors who lead these programs can attest to the impacts they have seen on their own students, there is a lack of understanding of the impacts of such programs across different universities and study abroad destinations. We also don’t know much about which educational activities abroad lead to the biggest gains for students.

We wanted to learn two things from this study:

1. What is the state of research evidence on the impact short-term faculty-led study abroad courses can have on university students’ global competence? and
2. Which educational activities in these courses seemed to have greatest impact on students’ global competence?

Our team searched for existing research studies that looked at outcomes of short-term study abroad for university students and included “global competence” as one of those outcomes. We conducted two systematic reviews. The first review focused on which components of global competence were most impacted by study abroad experiences and how instructors assessed students’ improvement, and the second review focused on identifying specific educational activities that were connected to improvements in global competence. We summarized the results of both reviews using visual methods including an Evidence Gap Map and a Spectrum Diagram to make our findings easier to interpret.

In our first review, we found 92 studies that included 215 global competence outcomes that fell into the domains of knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Most of the evidence we found was based on results instructors obtained by using surveys and review of students’ trip journals. For our second review, we found 86 studies that had found positive impacts on students’ global competence so we could look at what program activities were used by the instructors.

The evidence we found in review 1 suggests that both undergraduate and graduate students across many different disciplines have gained significant global competence knowledge, skills, and attitudes through participation in short-term study abroad courses designed and led by professors. From review 2 we learned that the educational activities used by instructors in these study abroad courses varied a great deal across programs and global regions, but the activities that seemed to be most connected with improvement in global competency were pre/post program sessions and meetings between students and subject matter experts in the destination country.

We could make reasonable connections between the study abroad courses in these studies and the improvements in students’ global competencies, but due to the designs of the individual studies we reviewed, we could not be certain that the study abroad course alone was what caused the improvement. Also, since instructors used many different methods to assess students’ growth from their respective study abroad course, we could not compare the outcomes from all studies on a consistent scale or from a consistent starting point. Similarly, because the educational activities used in each study abroad course were described in very different ways across studies, we may have interpreted them differently than the study authors intended. That said, we believe the findings from our two systematic reviews help to fill a knowledge gap and will be useful to professors who design short-term study abroad courses in the future.