Free-riding difficulty for foreign students: A cultural and linguistic problem

Abstract

Within this group work, we study the occurrence of free-riders in the group of foreign students and try to answer the question if a different cultural or linguistic background of one or more students in a group lead to a greater tendency of free-riding.
In a first step, we will introduce the general concepts and motivation of group work and we will define the aspect of free-riding, comparing it to literature.
In a second step, we will focus on the connection of problems foreign students are typically faced and interconnect this to the possibilities of becoming or appearing as a free-rider in some aspects.
We give some suggestions how this problem could be avoided and we compare it to previous studies.