Abstract

While explicit assessments like surveys and written reflections are commonly used to measure intercultural competence (IC) in virtual exchange (VE), the limitations of the assessments, such as cognitive loading, social desirability bias, and Dunning-Kruger effect, are rarely addressed. Implicit assessments have the potential to reduce the influence of such factors, but no relevant studies were found in the VE field. Hence, the goal of this paper is to pioneer an implicit assessment approach based on free association to explore changes in the internal outcomes component of IC in VE. 28 undergraduate students in Japan participated in a five-week asynchronous VE with Taiwanese partners. Free association was administered pre-VE and before the start of the last session of VE, which involved a near one-month break in between. Five single-word prompts were provided separately, and participants wrote down as many words as they could associate in one minute per prompt. The prompts aligned with the contents of the VE: tourism, hometown, sustainability, Taiwan, and Taiwanese. Including presumptuous words, six themes were identified: concepts, actions, feelings, places, people, and objects. In the post-VE free association, the total number of words for three prompts increased by over 15%, and the types of words for three prompts increased by over 20%. Additionally, fewer words related to content and more words related to culture were associated, thus implying expanded cultural knowledge and awareness. It is argued that intuitive data could be gathered to observe IC in VE using free association, and the limitations of explicit assessments could be mitigated to a certain extent.