Cultural Variations in styles of thinking.
Is it true that people from different cultures "think differently"? it seems clear that students from different cultures often bring different purposes to their thinking and learning. These different purposes produce different results, for example in the way the students respond to an essay topic, a problem or controversial piece of research. .
Most students think, study, and write in the way they have been trained at school and university. Each country has its own traditions not only about what students must learn but also how they should learn. In some countries students are not encouraged to ask questions; in others they are expected to question both their teachers and the materials they are learning. In some countries the teacher or lecturer provides all the information that the students must learn; in others students are expected to find most of their material independently, by reading or by their own experiments and research. When a student trained in one cultural tradition moves, as u are planning to move, to study in another country, a different style of learning is often necessary. .
A way of understanding the problems a student from another culture can face in moving to a Western tertiary system is to consider the case of an Indonesian postgraduate student who was writing her thesis on Indonesian literature. Her first attempt at writing the opening chapters of her thesis was severely criticized by her supervisor because it was "merely descriptive". In the first chapter the student had recounted the personal life of the author she was studying. Her next chapter consisted of a detailed summary, with long quotations, of a short story he had written. The next chapter was a summary of a novel, and so on. Her supervisor complained: "this work is not up to the level of senior high school students. It is disastrous for a student at postgraduate level.
