English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
Esperanto
French
German
Greek
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Urdu
“Intercultural Competence in a broad sense is understood as the activity and effectiveness of a person in a multicultural environment in relation to various aspects of intercultural diversity and dialogue,” said Marina Gridunova, PhD, Lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy at RUDN University, practical psychologist.
Intercultural competence (ICC) and related phenomena (intercultural sensitivity, intercultural communicative competence, cultural intelligence, intercultural effectiveness, etc.) are associated with a large number of social, psychological, pedagogical, and physiological factors. However, there are very few studies on the relationship of intercultural competence with cognitive (intellectual) abilities, understood as a person’s ability to process, store and retrieve information, including such processes as attention, memory and thinking
Scientists from RUDN (Irina Novikova, Marina Gridunova, Alexey Novikov and Dmitry Shlyakhta) investigated how intercultural competence is related to the cognitive abilities and academic performance of schoolchildren. The results of this study will help school psychologists to support students studying in a multicultural environment in order to develop their intercultural competence, taking into account their gender and cognitive differences.
“The development of intercultural competence is important for the modern individual in an unstable and diverse world. But there are too few studies of this phenomenon in the context of age, gender and intellectual differences. Therefore, our goal was to identify the relationship between ICC, cognitive abilities and academic achievements among Russian schoolchildren,” said Irina Novikova, PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy, RUDN University.
Psychologists studied 106 students of the 9th grade of a Moscow school aged 15-16 (55 girls and 51 boys). The level of competence was measured using the author’s modification of the questionnaire, developed on the basis of the Milton Bennett dynamic model of intercultural sensitivity. The questionnaire diagnoses four main orientations towards cultural diversity: Absolutization, Minimization (ethnocentric orientations), Ambivalence (transitional orientation), Acceptance (ethnorelative orientation). Ethnocentrism suggests that a person perceives their culture as central to others. The ethnorelativistic worldview recognizes the usefulness and independence of any culture. At the same time, psychologists determined the cognitive abilities of schoolchildren and used data on their academic performance.
As a result, RUDN University psychologists found that schoolchildren with higher cognitive abilities and good academic performance do not absolutize cultural differences and do not consider them barriers to communication. At the same time, of the studied intellectual abilities, intercultural competence is most affected by the ability to draw analogies and generalization has the opposite effect on the ICC of boys (negative) and girls (positive). In general, the differences between boys and girls turned out to be significant – boys more often overestimate and absolutize cultural differences, while girls attach less importance to them, but at the same time take them into account in communication.
“There are gender differences both in ICC scores and in the relationship of these scores to cognitive ability and achievement. The results of our study should be taken into account in the programs of psychological support for schoolchildren who study in a multicultural environment. In this direction, it will be useful to develop the cognitive abilities of schoolchildren and pay special attention to male students with poor academic performance,” Dmitry Shlyakhta, PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy, RUDN University.
