This study evaluates student and faculty experiences with an anti-racism unit added to a first-year seminar. Student attitudes about race shifted little, but gains were reported in more racially diverse classrooms and in factual information on racial inequality. A majority of students reported favorable reactions to an antiracism reading, with the…

Contemporary literature underscores the salience of First-Year seminars (FYS) in supporting the success of college students. The problem is that the research outlining the characteristics of FYS at two-year colleges is sparse, particularly when certain populations are required to enroll in these courses. There is little information about how these…

Learning Communities (LCs) and First-Year Seminars (FYS) are common support systems for college students. This article explores the use of such systems with undergraduate international students in their first semester of study as a means to help them better acclimate to campus life and rigorous classroom expectations.

Collaborative worldbuilding is an ideal digital writing project for promoting critical thinking about contemporary issues, developing and applying disciplinary expertise writing transfer, and building digital literacies. In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic where the student experience was characterised by isolation, collaborative…

To promote learning and academic success among undergraduates, many colleges and universities offer or require students to participate in high-impact practices, which include first-year seminars, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, service-learning, diversity/global learning, internships, and capstone projects. However, the research…

Mindfulness training (MT) has shown promise in improving psychological health among college students yet has rarely been evaluated as an addition to the college academic curriculum. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of a first-year MT seminar offered to residential students at a selective private university, evaluating its…

This paper explores the course design and implementation of a first-year discovery seminar on "Living in the Metaverse" offered at a business university. Integrated with standardized college-readiness topics, the course combines hands-on activities with collaborative assignments and class discussions to present a multidisciplinary…

This case study examined the connection of First-Year Seminars (FYS) and Performance Funding outcomes in the State of Florida. The comparison of Florida State performance metrics and the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of FYS on these metrics was conducted to determine which performance metrics, if any, can be indirectly supported by…

University Honors programming in the United States is interdisciplinary and collaborative; from First Year Seminars to capstone research projects for upperclassmen, students embrace multidisciplinary learning and research. This approach, however, does not always translate into an incorporation of diverse perspectives of multiple faculty members in…

This paper describes the impact of a learning strategies intervention conducted in first-year seminar courses that, 1) disaggregated components of academic skills into meaningful components for first-year students, 2) taught students academic skills within an authentic context, and 3) scaled-up the intervention for implementation at a programmatic…

As the qualitative portion of a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study, this study identified the attitudes, behaviors, and teaching strategies of first-year seminar instructors whose students of color exhibited the highest gains in thriving at the end of their first semester. Thriving students are those who are fully engaged psychologically,…

Utilizing culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to acculturate first-time-in-college students attending minority-serving institutions into the postsecondary setting is a higher educational imperative. The current study utilizes Ladson-Billings' (1995b) CRP as a theoretical frame to explore the teaching practices in the first-year seminars (FYSs) at…

Evaluating information is an essential skill, valued across disciplines. While librarians and instructors share the responsibility to teach this skill, they need a common framework in order to collaborate to design assignments that give students multiple opportunities to learn. Librarians and First Year Seminar faculty at Belmont University…

Students in The Honors College at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh are required to take a team-taught first-year seminar in their first semester. The seminar is theme-based and taught by two professors from two different disciplines. The theme of the seminar is food, one teacher is a professor of geography and the other a professor of…

This article argues for a pedagogical approach to the sociology of sport and physical education that centers writing. Drawing on student reflections from my first year seminar in academic writing 'Social Inequality and Sports,' I demonstrate that students are more inclined to entertain the imperatives of critical pedagogies in the context of sport…