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…

In the field of college success and retention, researchers have examined school facilities, grade point averages, SAT scores, high school grades, and student involvement among other variables. One of the additional variables that has been examined is how happiness affects college success. The matter of student happiness is of primary importance to…

First-Year Seminars (FYS) are among the high-impact practices described by AAC&U. We studied the long-standing First-Year Seminar Program at our public research university for the ways in which writing assignments--individualized for each seminar--help faculty and students achieve program objectives in critical and analytical thinking, the…

Retention rates of students in a business school Freshman Year Experience (FYE) course were compared to overall University retention rates for two successive years. Slightly higher retention was experienced by the business FYE students than for the University overall. Student responses to exit survey questions were compared to retention activity…

The transition into college remains one of the most formative and complex phases in an individual's life. Institutions of higher learning have responded to the challenges facing first-year students in myriad ways, most often by offering summer orientation programs, dynamic living-learning environments, tailored academic and psychological support…

This study used peer-reviewed published research reports to teach a seminar on learning and memory to first-semester college students. Complete reports (not summaries, reviews, or news reports) were re-written by this author to be more "student friendly" to college freshmen. These adapted published research reports (APRRs) retained…

This article reports findings from two studies assessing reading compliance among first semester freshmen at a small Midwestern two-year liberal arts university. The first study assessed reading compliance of students enrolled in two sections of First Year Seminar, finding that 46% of students reported that they read assignments, yet only 55% of…

In this article, I report on the development and validation of a new survey instrument measuring first-year students' perceptions of the advising relationship. I collected survey data from 113 residential freshmen enrolled in a first-year seminar course at a small, public, midwestern university during the fall of 2009. Factor analysis of students'…

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 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…