Research in both education and in entrepreneurship has shown that certain attitudes, skills, and behaviors are helpful in working through problems to achieve success (Brown & Ryan, 2003; Dino, 2015; Duckworth et al, 2007; Dweck, 2009; MacCann et al., 2012; Metcalfe & Shumamura,1994; West et al., 2016). Fortunately, many of these attitudes,…

This correlational quantitative study examined faculty mindset and factors of student success in first-year seminar courses at one public university of access in the northeast United States. Participants included 46 faculty members and 840 first-year undergraduate students. From the quantitative data collected, a Pearson correlation determined…

The accountability of institutions of higher education to ensure high-quality student learning which is requisite for success in the twenty-first century economy is increasingly remiss (Kuh & Ikenberry, 2015). Institutional researchers have reported limited academic gains among college graduates, a result of students' disengagement in…

Offering first year seminars and experiences is well-established as one of the high-impact educational practices. An inquiry-based freshman seminar in which students conduct poverty simulation term projects has been offered for five years at the University of Georgia. The students have four project options of: dressing the part and panhandling…

We designed the Integrated Sciences First-Year Program (ISFP) to introduce students to the nature and process of science early in their academic career, help them develop skills and competencies, and create an intellectual community of learners to foster belonging within science. Using their inherent curiosity, we designed active learning…

This paper brings together general principles for teaching inquiry across disciplines with those generally employed in mathematics classrooms. It describes some broad principles of teaching inquiry to first-year writing students and shows how these can be employed in the context of a course on game theory in popular culture. Although undergraduate…

Most first-year seminars exist to ensure that incoming students achieve what is commonly described as "academic success." While definitions of this term vary widely, it most often means socializing students into an academic culture so that they will remain at the institution, achieve a strong GPA, and graduate on time. Most first-year…

This "Practices from the Field" article describes the rationale and operationalization of an interdisciplinary team-taught first-year inquiry seminar and learning community program at a large predominantly White research institution. The authors both serve as faculty members in the College of Education and Human Development and teach in…

This case study reports on the process for creating a self-paced non-credit information literacy (IL) course delivered via a university's course management system. The four online modules are designed to contextualize information literacy competencies within the curriculum taught in First Year Seminar (FYS) courses. The meta-course approach…

2017 is the anniversary of the introduction of what are now commonly known as high-impact practices (HIPs). Many of the specific activities pursued under the HIPs acronym have been around in some form for decades, such as study abroad, internships, and student-faculty research. It was about ten years ago that, after conferring HIPs at Ten with…

Online courses are increasing in popularity while universities are using first-year seminars to address the challenges of large impersonal classes, lack of student engagement, and increased skills development. Could the learning experience and benefits of an in-person first-year seminar be achieved through an online distance education (DE) format?…