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The Cardinal Edge

Program/Event

Arts and Research Showcase 2025

Abstract

The analysis of education data from the National Foundation for American Policy demonstrates that between 50% and 82% of the full-time graduate students in STEM fields at United States universities are international students who provide a wide range of expertise, knowledge, and skills needed to participate in the STEM workforce (National Foundation for American Policy, 2017). One of the challenges international college students face is self-perceived linguistic discrimination, defined as a person’s individual experience of feeling unfairly treated due to their accent, proficiency, or choice of language. The objective of this study is to develop a protocol for a systematic review using the Open Science Framework to explore the impact of self-perceived linguistic discrimination on international students' mental health. The systematic review stages included protocol design, performing literature searches, screening literature using the Covidence software, extracting the data, and reporting the results. The search strategy was conducted using the following query strings- (“linguistic discrim*” OR “language discrim*”) AND (international student* OR foreign student*) AND (college OR university OR “higher education”) AND (“mental health” OR “mental disorders” OR anxiety OR depression OR suicid*). The APA PsycArticles, APA PsycINFO, ProQuest Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, and PubMed databases were used. As for our inclusion criteria, we included only peer-reviewed articles. The articles described mental health effects, including, but not limited to depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and suicide and their relationships to self-perceived linguistic discrimination in college-level international students. After literature searches, screening will be performed in the Covidence software using all articles located during the searches. Title and abstract screening will be followed by full-text screening using two independent screeners, with a third for reconciliation upon disagreement. The included articles will then go through data extraction. At last, the synthesis and quality assessment stage will include the coding system and the use of Critical Appraisal Skills Program (CASP) checklists for quality assessment. The synthesized data will be reported in a final systematic review paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, and will encourage inclusive environments in educational settings that recognize the emotional and psychological needs of international students, promoting well-being and academic success.

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