This study examines the impact of culturally responsive pedagogy in an introduction to university course developed specifically for Aboriginal Access students. The pedagogy has been conceptualized to reflect interconnectivity in a nested system, where all facets of learning link with each other on emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical levels.…

This mixed-method study assessed the effectiveness of a First-Year Seminar (FYS) course on students' successful accomplishment of learning outcomes that can be used beyond graduation: motivation, time-management, and decision-making. Students' quantitative responses indicated that the course had the highest impact on their motivation (M = 4.43, SD…

The widespread popularity of programs for first-year students is due, in large part, to studies showing that participation in first-year programs is significantly related to students' academic success. Because students choose to participate in first-year programs, self-selection effects prevent researchers from making causal claims about the…

Purpose: For many years, the Lupton Library offered a traditional library introduction class to first year students participating in the Freshman Seminar Program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In 2007, the library applied for and received a campus grant to purchase thirty iPod Touches, along with accompanying hardware and software.…

This study serves as the preliminary analyses of a pilot study of community college students who persisted through their remedial classes and their programs of study and had attained the associate degree at a multicultural community college. This study is informed by Tinto's academic integration model, Astin's social involvement model and Freire's…

As a recent curriculum innovation replacing Freshman English, the Freshman Investigative Seminar consists of 12 or 13 students meeting for one semester of five weekly class hours, directed by faculty from different disciplines. Its objectives are to lead the student to learn how to gather information from various sources, how to keep accurate…

Vassar offers two types of computer courses: (1) the introductory courses in Computer Science Studies convey the intrinsic features of computer systems and stress their capacities to support established numeric and symbolic modes of inquiry and (2) the Freshmen Seminars which reveal the facility of computers for aiding man's critical process by…

Several learning communities and first-year programs have been developed at Bowling Green State University, a public doctoral-research intensive university in the midwest, over the last few years. Such programs include the Bowling Green Effect Mentoring Program, the Literacy Serve and Learn program, the Honors Program, the Center for Multicultural…

In response to demographic changes among entering college students, more and more colleges are offering freshman orientation courses that have come to be known as "College 101." At Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, a course called COL 101 was begun in 1985. A survey of teachers of the course investigated speech or oral…

Students often arrive at universities ill-prepared for the reflective practice needed to derive maximum benefits from a Freshman Seminar. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, portfolio projects are semester-long assignments in which the portfolio serves as a capstone activity to help freshmen more thoroughly analyze their first year…

The IowaLink Program at the University of Iowa is a two-semester, academic support program for recruited students. The program provides an extended academic transition between high school and college for students who have demonstrated the potential to succeed at Iowa but who do not meet standards for regular admission. One of the features of the…

First-year students taking developmental courses need the kind of guidance a freshman seminar can provide when the advice is directly relevant to their progress. An alternative to assigning a heterogeneous group of students to an academic advisor is to offer a course which enriches the key elements of a freshman seminar while applying the standard…

One version of a first year seminar in rhetoric examines the President Kennedy assassination controversy as seen by several writers in a rhetorical framework that stresses the difference, particularly in regard to the writers' approaches to truth, in intellectual and imaginative discourses. The assignments, three major writing projects, introduce…

At Creighton Univesity, a Jesuit university in Nebraska, freshmen defined as at risk academically were required to participate in a student success program, the Master Student Course (MAST). The MAST program was designed to help these at-risk students develop college-level study and thinking skills and to provide an opportunity for examination of…

At the end of the fifth year of a successful, ever expanding freshman seminar program, students in selected sections of the course, who were also enrolled in developmental reading/writing, were asked to evaluate the worthiness of the goals in terms of their own freshman year experience. The fifth year was a new pilot year for the program. Some…