Resumo

A discrepancy persists between the promises made by long-term study abroad (LTSA) programs and the evidence produced by researchers. To the best of your knowledge, there is no existing systematic review of LTSA. Therefore, this paper seeks to identify the outcomes of LTSA programs. In the first section of this article, we provide an overview of the SA literature and explain why LTSA deserves to be studied separately, then we report our method. We report the general findings outcomes and conclude with the academic and practical implications of this research, its limitation and the future agenda

This study employs a systematic review of the recent corpus of literature on SA to analyze the outcomes of long-term study abroad (LTSA) programs. The research question that we seek to address in this study is as follows: “What are the outcomes of students who have participated in an exchange program at a higher education institution for a period of six months to one year?”

SA research is primarily based on Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) (Kolb, 1984), which emphasizes the critical role that experience plays in the impact of learning and change. Kolb (1984) defines learning as a continuous process of adapting to the environment by acquiring new information, challenging the knowledge and relearning and integrating it into action. ELT outlines four basic stages that individuals go through during the experiential learning cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation (Kolb & Kolb, 2005).

A substantial increase in ample sizes is necessary, given that a third of LTSA studies are based on samples of under 60 participants and 55% have less than one respondent per scale item, which is considered the minimum necessary for reliable analysis. Furthermore, the majority of data utilized by the authors in studies with larger samples lack the necessary information for a more comprehensive analysis necessary information for a more comprehensive analysis, such as gender, income, prior travel abroad, language proficiency, parents' level of education and SAP educational background.

The outcomes identified in this work serve as further guidance for future research into LTSA, however, the significant gains in intercultural, academic, personal, and career terms should be interpreted with caution. Despite the considerable growth in the number of publications on the topic of LTSA, particularly over the past two decades, some of the limitations highlighted by Dwyer (2004) persist in studies investigating LTSA outcomes: small samples, need for more empirical studies that correlated length of study with outcomes, reported inconsistent findings, lack of sustainability of results.

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