Model for implementing the process of integration of Chinese students into the student community of a Russian international-profile university and ways to evaluate its effectiveness

Abstract

The process of sociocultural integration of Chinese students into the student community of Russian international-profile universities is characterized by significant conceptual complexity arising from the ambiguity of interpretations of the integration phenomenon itself in pedagogical science. The analysis reveals a stable tendency toward quasi-integration, in which formal inclusion in the educational process is combined with the preservation of ethnic enclavization in non-academic space. This is determined by the maximum linguistic distance between Russian and Chinese, the influence of Confucian pedagogical traditions, and structural conditions of student concentration. The proposed model for implementing this process is based on three interrelated levels – institutional infrastructure, pedagogical interaction, and student community – each of which is given specific content in view of Russian institutional characteristics. At the institutional level, the focus is on resource and regulatory support, including coordination of structural units; the pedagogical level involves the organization of joint project activities with compulsory group formation and active management of group dynamics; the student community level is oriented toward creating practice-oriented entry points through specialized sections and clubs. The model includes diagnostic, linguocommunicative, cross-cultural, event-based, and monitoring blocks, emphasizing the necessity of transitioning from accompanying to constructive mechanisms. Evaluation of effectiveness requires multicomponent tools, including sociometric methods, network analysis, content analysis of narratives, and longitudinal observation, since traditional proxy indicators do not reflect the communicative and value-normative dimensions of this nonlinear bidirectional process. The identified asymmetry in the distribution of institutional efforts, which are concentrated primarily at the infrastructure level, points to prospects for improving the regulatory framework and taking into account the role of the digital environment in integration or segregation. This approach makes it possible to better understand the mechanisms of intercultural interaction in the context of the globalization of higher education and to determine the conditions for the formation of a genuine academic community.