The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of adult learners in a first-year seminar course at Columbia State Community College, located in middle Tennessee, to determine if the content of the course has an impact on the learners' adjustment to college. With the statewide initiative to reach a goal of 55% of the state's population…

What is the impact on student learning when Education is taught through the Arts in a diploma level bridging course? This paper describes and analyses the experiences of 350 students when the expectation of a first-semester, first-year unit in an Education course is to devise and perform an ethnodrama -- a drama based on the lives of the students…

The University of Maryland First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE) was launched in 2014 and initially developed to provide a broad range of undergraduate students with research experience. As the program has grown and matured during six years of operation, the student outcomes targeted have evolved to include a broader range of…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to provide insights into the antecedents of student attitudes toward the first required accounting course by examining five related research questions. Design/Method/Approach: Interviews were conducted and open coding, as opposed to priori coding, was used to analyse the responses using the NVivo software.…

This study was conducted to understand the experiences of wellness among Latino first-year students at a four-year institution in the Southwest. The Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle (Meyers, Sweeny, & Witmer, 2001, 2004, 2011) was utilized as an analytical tool to further draw upon interview questions and themes. In hopes to inform a body of…

Previous research has revealed how mature students are more likely to drop out of university education, achieve poorer degree outcomes and have greater family, financial, caring and work commitments to contend with than their younger peers. In response to calls for further empirical work on mature students' university experiences and informed…

Background: Developing teamwork skills is a central objective of engineering education. Psychological safety and conflict management are pivotal components of teamwork, yet despite their significance, research in engineering project-based learning (PBL) contexts is scant. Understanding students' experiences with psychological safety and its…

Within psychology education, there is a growing focus on undergraduate students' psychological literacy; enabling students earlier in their psychological training to directly apply their learning to their lives and in addressing contemporary societal challenges. This growing focus was a key driver for the creation of the course "Connecting…

The transition from school to university is challenging and a greater knowledge of the first-year student experience will enable staff to better support their students. University- and government-run student surveys fail to capture the depth and breadth of the first-year experience and so qualitative research is needed to get a more nuanced and…

Undergraduate STEM retention has been a longstanding concern. Specifically, majors such as engineering have experienced a high dropout rate consistently in the past several decades. This study is aimed at understanding factors contributing to making the engineering major challenging, and individual factors that help first-year engineering students…

Recent world events and the ever-changing nature of higher education mean that colleges and universities exist in a state of near-constant flux. This qualitative study explored the experiences of seven college seniors who persisted to graduation after beginning their college careers when their university was admitting lower-division students for…

In this study we investigate how first-year chemistry/biology undergraduate students' original poetry can be used as a reflective tool for others to understand their course experiences. By inviting students from an integrated first-year chemistry/biology course to write poetry about their experiences, we use poetic content analysis as a…

Engineering and pop-culturist instructors team-teach a first-year experience course exploring science through the lenses of history, literature, film, television, and sequential art. Authors present science fiction discourses as unique for synthesizing fields in the humanities and STEM, and they present curricular and co-curricular design…

The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL), as a public comprehensive regional university of approximately 10,500 students, utilized National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data regarding advising to jumpstart several key advancements that have yielded positive improvements as indicated in the most recent NSSE assessment data. Despite strong…

COVID-19 developed challenges worldwide. As educators did their best to develop online courses overnight, high school students faced many restrictions during the pandemic. High school students lost life experiences, educational experiences, and social experiences. As they enter college, these students struggle with trauma and inexperience.…