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…

Last fall the author taught two sections of a first-year seminar on activism and volunteering, called "Raise a Fist, Lend a Hand: Activism and Volunteerism at the Dawn of the 21st Century," at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest. She had noted in the course description that a community-service requirement was included, so she…

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…

This study hypothesized that student performance in a First Year Introduction program (FYI), representing an initial sampling of students' academic behaviors, would correlate with subsequent academic success. Subjects were 1,501 first-time, first-year students attending Columbia Basin College in fall quarter 2007, whose FYI performance was graded…

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…

In this study, the authors examine the differences between two groups of students--those enrolled in either an independent section of a first-year seminar and those enrolled in a first-year seminar embedded in a learning community. In particular, the authors focused on the extent to which course/program outcomes were being met, as reported by…

Multicultural awareness education is an important first step in preparing future teachers to become effective instructors of diverse classrooms. Whereas there are a variety of ways to develop multicultural awareness, we have found film to be an effective and exciting teaching tool. We applied film as a means of facilitating in-depth reflection and…

This study compared two approaches to a first-year seminar, special academic theme vs. college transition theme, to determine if one approach was more effective in terms of one-year retention rates, first-year grade point averages (GPAs), and student perceptions of the course experience and outcomes. Participants included 177 first-semester,…

Perhaps one of the most underemphasized strategies for achieving student success within the community college is the development and implementation of an intentional, comprehensive approach to orienting new students to the college environment. Orientation can be considered as any effort by an institution to help students make a successful…

Higher education continues to wrestle with the challenge of engaging and retaining traditionally marginalized populations, particularly first-generation college students of color from low-income backgrounds. The typical North American campus, as a privileged space, has failed to successfully address or dismantle systems of power and difference…

Previously, we reported qualitative findings showing that students who experienced a problem- or enquiry-based course (EBL) in a first-year seminar program had greater confidence in their academic abilities, were more engaged, and were better prepared for upper-year courses. In the current paper, we provide quantitative data to substantiate the…

Academic departments have expanded the typical persistence agenda of First-Year Seminars to use them specifically as tools for in-major retention. This article reports the empirical results of a four-year longitudinal study assessing the successful efforts to improve the persistence-to-graduation-within-major of business students. The pedagogy can…

This paper details the First-Year Career Development Program (First-Year Program)--a component of a comprehensive multi-year program designed to guide business students through self-assessment and the selection of an appropriate business major and ultimately to prepare them to secure professional career positions. The First-Year Program is…

This quantitative research study sought to measure the impact of first-year seminar participation on three correlates of student retention: academic integration, social integration, and satisfaction with college life. Results suggest that students who participate in first-year seminars are not necessarily more integrated into the academic and…

The attempt of writing center consultants to discourage faculty from requiring classes to visit the writing center led to research that calls this longstanding practice into question. In the early days of the proliferation of writing centers, faculty were advised not to require either individual students or entire classes to go to the writing…