"The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success," a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a first-year seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or…

As in many other fields of science and technology, college students in computer engineering do not come into full contact with the key ideas and challenges of their chosen discipline until the third year of their studies. This situation poses a problem in terms of keeping the students motivated as they labor through their foundational, basic…

Research has shown that first-generation, low-income college students experience both isolation and marginalization, especially during their first-year of college, which impacts their long-term persistence in higher education. In this article, I argue that learning community pedagogy designed with attention to multicultural curricula is one…

"The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success," a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a firstyear seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or…

Do learning communities with pedagogies of active learning, collaborative learning, and integration of course material affect the learning, achievement, and persistence of first-year Latino university students? The data for this project was obtained from a survey of 1,330 first-year students in the First-Year Learning Community Program at Texas…

A large, suburban, Southeastern university conducted a multi-method study on the effectiveness of its common reader program in meeting multiple learning objectives. Data from approximately 700 respondents, all of whom were first-year students enrolled in 37 sections of the university's traditional first-year seminar course, revealed that the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of students and faculty involved in a living-learning first-year experience program at a small, liberal arts institution about developing skills for life-long learning including critical thinking, written communication, and reflection and engagement across disciplines. The researcher…

College student degree attainment has been identified as a national issue, and recently has become a topic of emphasis for institutions of higher education. In the past, research has focused on retaining students from year one in college to year two. With the demand for baccalaureate-prepared graduates increasing and the charge to compete in a…

Transfer of learning is defined as the ability to transfer previously learned skills into a new, similar or dissimilar situation. The transfer of learning has been a topic of debate amongst educational psychologists for decades. A variety of studies have been done to show evidence of the transfer of learning dating back to 1901. These studies have…

"The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success," a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a first-year seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

This study explored how college freshmen at a mid-sized public university in north-eastern United States used Twitter, an anytime/anywhere writing technology, to support and promote the writing process by using tweets as a pre-writing activity. Two of the authors taught a joint course of First Year Seminar and Basic Reading in which the same group…

In this article, the authors unpack a first-year college seminar where students explored digital representations of self-afforded pedagogies of possibility for traditionally marginalized student populations, specifically students of colour and first-generation college goers. An artefact analysis model is used to trace the relationship between the…

The purpose of this study was to (a) determine the extent to which Latina/o students' perceptions of support from high school teachers and counselors, as well as acculturation, predict enrollment in AP coursework; (b) examine Latina/o students' perceptions of different forms of support that appear to play a role in academic success (Hassinger…

Purpose: The purpose of this directory was to identify, describe, and evaluate evidence that the education practices improve academic performance, close the achievement gap, and improve persistence towards graduation for low-income, first-generation, and historically-underrepresented 6th grade through college students. Method: The sample for the…