University students crave immersive, collaborative, interdisciplinary, applied learning contextualized to real world sustainability challenges. Liberal arts and sciences institutions are particularly well positioned to respond. Here we report on our high impact, cross-disciplinary, biomimicry-themed firstyear experience (FYE) curricula. Biomimicry…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Assessment in Postsecondary Chemistry Education: A Comparison of Course Types (Rebecca E. Gibbons, Jessica J. Reed, Shalini Srinivasan, Sachel M. Villafañe, Emily Laga, Joshua Vega, Kristen L. Murphy, and Jeffrey R. Raker); (2) Beyond Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic:…

While the scholarship of interdisciplinarity has grown prolifically in the last thirty years, the discourse primarily frames interdisciplinarity as an instrumental research construct. In this article, I will argue that this framework should be expanded to consider how interdisciplinary engagement can support education for democracy. The article…

Recognizing the changing demographics of students applying to college coupled with Trinity University's responsibility to help our students succeed, we have created a Summer Bridge program that focuses on first-generation, underrepresented students (FGUS). Trinity's Summer Bridge program has been a success--both in terms of student performance and…

By analyzing the audio recording and transcription of classroom discourse, this case study focused on the ways in which the instructor used follow-up statements to socialize students into intellectual talk. Four relevant categories of follow-up statements emerged: (a) revoicing, (b) contextualization, (c) parallel elaboration, and (d) assistive…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…

Fostering students' intellectual curiosity is a common goal of first-year seminar programs--especially in liberal arts settings. The authors propose an alternative method to assess this ambiguous, value-laden concept. Relying on data gathered from pre- and posttest in-depth interviews of 34 students enrolled in first-year seminars, they construct…

Ideal for faculty and administrators looking to blend business education and the liberal arts, this toolkit combines exemplary syllabi from 26 leading institutions with step-by-step strategies to advocate successfully for curricular innovation. Conceived with comprehensiveness in mind, these resources cover both inspiration and implementation for…

The current paper used data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education--a longitudinal, pretest/posttest design--to estimate the effects of participation in the ten "high-impact" educational practices put forth and endorsed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) on a variety of liberal arts…

This article investigates the evolution of friendships formed during a first-year seminar for honors students enrolled in a private liberal arts college. Through an electronic survey and interviews with former students who had participated in the seminar course six years prior to the research, this case study examined why some friendships were…

First year students, like all students at a university, comprise a diverse mixture of personal traits, backgrounds, experiences, and assorted learning styles. Each of these unique student characteristics can either enhance or inhibit successful integration to the campus community. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of various…

In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on student success and retention in higher education. To address this issue, many universities' strategic retention programs include first-year seminars. A variety of pedagogical strategies have been employed in these seminars to help students succeed personally, socially and academically. This…

First-year seminars have become common at liberal arts and other colleges across the United States. An accumulating body of research appears to demonstrate that this curricular element is associated with increased retention of students and is positively correlated with graduation rates, student adjustment and involvement, student satisfaction,…

The authors investigated changes in self-efficacy in writing and writing apprehension in a sample of first-year college students in an interdisciplinary writing-intensive course taught by faculty from varied disciplines at a liberal arts college. Results showed that self-efficacy in writing significantly increased while writing apprehension…