"I come from a very different educational system," says physics graduate student Iuliana who is from Romania. "Everyone is very conservative, usually students don't speak so much."
But Wilkinson says at Harvard such barriers do not truly make a huge difference in teaching fellows' ability in the classroom.
"It's really mixed," he says. "There are some that have low CUE ratings."
But of the approximately 30 teaching fellows who rank below a 2.8 on the CUE scale, the majority are American born, he says, and foreign born graduate students are not on that list disproportionately to their numbers in the ranks of teaching fellows.
Wilkinson says he hopes the Bok Center's efforts can help alleviate the foreign students' difficulties through training and evaluations. Over half of the foreign born teaching fellows come to the Bok Center, he estimates.
"By and large, the foreign teaching fellows are trying very hard," he says.
Student preconceptions are a difficult and complex "educational issue," he says, and "it's something we're just beginning to understand belongs on the educational agenda.