Cognitive Problems of Immigrant Students

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What academic struggles will be happened on immigrant students? What kind of thoughts will be brought up to them? In The Happiness Hypothesis, Johnathan Haidt talks about negatively bias in “Changing Your Mind”. This chapter is the best to describe the situation of the immigrant students. According to Kim and Diaz in "Immigrant Students And
Community Colleges”, they state that “immigrant students who attend community colleges tend to have lower socioeconomic status and limited English knowledge compared to those who enter four-year institutions.” (93) Many immigrant students have to do part time and face demanding work at school. The most important is they only have limited knowledge in
English. My friend, as an immigrant student, she always found difficulty in her academic field in the first two years of school in United States. She worked very hard and checked every word that she didn’t familiar in, but she was still not getting a B or higher. Her sadness and hopelessness covered all her pleasure and she thought that she would never get a better grade next time.
The cognitive problem which immigrant students have is academic struggle. This can be explained in Haidt’s book in the chapter two of “Changing Your Mind”. The chapter states that human are easily to change thoughts as human mind is flexible. Human mind tends to react to bad things strongly and sensitively. Different perspectives affect how we see an event. At the same time, thought and emotion are related and affected to each other to influence our judgment. In the book, Haidt uses “elephant” and “rider” to represent human mind and human respectively. He uses these two metaphors to explain cognitive mind throughout all chapters. Lack of English kno...

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