Assessing Student Interest and Prior Knowledge in Global Education

In the period of“ Super Global University Initiative” in Japan, many universities have made global education part of their core mission. The objectives of most of these courses and programs are not student-centered, however, resulting to decrease the possibilities for students’ successful engagement in the course content. For this purpose, this paper examines the prior knowledge and learning interest of undergraduate students participating in a course on a comparative study of education in Japan and education in several countries around the world. The KWL strategy was employed to gather the needed information. The result illustrates the aspects of global education the participants were interested in and the relationship between previous knowledge and what they desired to learn. Furthermore, the result suggested several pedagogical implications with respect to developing programs for global education.