First-year seminars (FYS) comprise one of 11 researched interventions in postsecondary education known as High-Impact Practices, but few rigorous studies report significantly high impacts. This study examined a FYS employing propensity score matching to link cases and controls in a quasi-experimental design. One semester later cumulative grade…

Starting university is challenging. Students require resilience to face the inevitable challenges of university life, yet many may not be equipped with the strategies they need. In this research, we explored changes in resilience following the delivery of a resilience building module within a core first-year university course. Psychology students…

Sustainability is an important issue that we all face, including higher education students. We assert that the transition into the contemporary higher education context needs educators to plan transition pedagogy that engages students with the world during their studies, instead of solely using curriculum as preparation for the future world of…

The purpose of this article is to describe a doctoral residency seminar course that is part of a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction degree program. Courses such as these provide new doctoral students with the necessary experiences to help them succeed in the program. This course is a venue for students to discuss the degree program, including…

Nearly half of all students in the United States are placed into at least one developmental course in college. Many of these students fail to complete developmental course sequences and persist to degree completion. First-Year Seminars are one of several high-impact practices associated with increased persistence, retention, and graduation rates…

Milner (2012) defines opportunity gaps as the uncontrollable factors such as race, language, or economic status that can impact students' success in schools. Rather than placing focus on students' achievement, examinations of opportunity gaps emphasize the systems and structures that may contribute to disparities in student outcomes. The…

This article reports on data collected from a study of 101 students taking a first-year experience course. Using a mapping methodology in an effort to understand what resources students could identify and what relationships they saw between resources, the study showed that resources associated with a specific location or connected with people were…

This paper explores an inter-learning teaching method designed and utilized by the authors in the Winter 2021 term for first- and upper-year therapeutic recreation (TR) students in an online platform. This collaborative teaching method sought to make intentional space for upper-year students to take the lead on and facilitate seminars for…

We report the short- and longer-term impacts of offering a 1-credit introductory seminar to first-year chemical engineering students. Students who completed the seminar demonstrated a better awareness of the major, career opportunities, and academic success strategies than students who did not enroll in the seminar. A longer-term comparison showed…

At an institution which serves mostly commuting students who are first generation and often balancing life responsibilities, online learning is enticing and presents challenges. Students can struggle with the required skills of self-regulation, effective time-management, communication, and balancing needs. In the spring of 2022, an innovative…

Drawing from our experiences facilitating an FYE faculty development program, we highlight how we have practiced elements of trauma-informed pedagogy to work with first-year students and faculty. We discuss how both students and faculty can benefit from a more complex process of cultivating relationships through mindfulness. Practices of…

Higher education has seen an increase in first-year students who arrive with significant early college credit. There is a gap in research about how first-year seminars meet the transition needs of students with college-level experience obtained during high school. This qualitative study, guided by Schlossberg's (1989) transition theory, explored…

A first-year general education core course can act as a keystone connecting general education and specialized major courses, enhancing their value in the eyes of students and recognizing student goals for both career preparation and self-discovery. The core course introduces themes based on distinctive institutional mission and identity and also…

Climate change denial is often treated as a binary opinion. However, an individual can express acceptance of climate change, while still denying other aspects of the field such as its causation by humans, impacts, or our ability to mitigate these impacts. Here, we conduct a semester long survey and discourse analysis of a class of first-year…

A key goal of higher education is to graduate citizens who are actively engaged in the process of democracy. Yet, it is a challenge to build a curriculum with this in mind. Herein, we describe a multi-year process of creating and supporting a movement to centralize undergraduates' civic identity development across the curriculum. The result is a…