Cultivating Student Global Competence: A Pilot Experimental Study

ABSTRACT Although student global competence has been recognized as an important learning outcome by more and more colleges and universities, campus internationalization efforts remain fragmented and largely ineffective. We proposed a pedagogical intervention that provided students from China and the U.S. with opportunities to establish virtual contact and to work collaboratively on international business related research papers. Then, we operationalized global competence as a three‐dimensional concept and designed an instrument to measure student global competence. The results provided some initial evidence on American students’ significantly lower performance in global knowledge and attitude, and confirmed the proposed pedagogical intervention as an easy‐to‐use and effective supplement to develop student global competence.