Intercultural Competence Assessment and Evaluation

As a part of internationalization efforts, The Center for Global Engagement provides ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of intercultural programs on the development of students' intercultural competence.

What is Intercultural Competence and how do we measure it has been a widely debated concept in International Higher Education. According to leading experts in the field, Intercultural Competence can defined as:

"A simple definition, however, might be: the abilities to perform effectively and appropriately with members of another language-culture background on their terms."

By Alvino E. Fantini, Ph.D.,
School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont

"Knowledge of others; knowledge of self; skills to interpret and relate; skills to discover and/or to interact; valuing others' values, beliefs, and behaviors; and relativizing one's self."

By Darla Deardorff, Ph.D.
Executive Director of the Association of International Education Administrators

Intercultural Competence involves a number of additional terms and concepts including global competence, global awareness, global citizenship, cross-cultural competence, international competence, intercultural effectiveness, intercultural sensitivity, etc.

Download Article:
Darla Deardorff "In Search for Intercultural Competence"

Assesment Tools
The Center for Global Engagement currently uses two assessment tools.

Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI®) is a statistically reliable, cross-culturally valid measure of intercultural competence adapted from the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity by Dr. Milton Bennett. IDI® owned and operated by Mitchell R. Hammer, Ph.D. specializes in the assessment and development of intercultural competence. IDI Sample Profile can be viewed here.

Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI) measures a person's global perspective. It was developed by Larry Braskamp, David Braskamp, Kelly Carter Merrill and Mark Engberg with the idea that all persons - students, faculty, staff--- are on a journey of life, in which they keep asking three major questions: How do I know? Who am I? How do I relate to others? For more information on GPI, please refer to the website https://gpi.central.edu/

For details and information about assessment, please contact Aleks Nesic, Intercultural Specialist for Training and Assessment. anesic@admin.fsu.edu